No One Will Save You Ending Explained: What Really Happened to Brynn?

This article contains spoilers

Hulu’s highly anticipated sci-fi-horror No One Will Save You is now streaming, and it’s fair to say the alien invasion movie offers genre fans a highly entertaining 90-odd minutes worth of entertainment, along with a complex ending that’s sure to leave some scratching their heads.

In the new film, directed by by Brian Duffield, we meet Brynn Adams (Unbelievable star Kaitlyn Dever) a beautiful young girl living a lonely life in small town America. At first, it seems that No One Will Save You is set in the past, as Brynn lives almost off the grid in a house filled with old furniture. She has a rotary phone, wears mid-century clothing, and doesn’t appear to have a job. As time passes, we realize that Brynn is in fact living in the present day.

Brynn is anxious about leaving her house and talking to other people, a fear that seems justified when the people of the town seem upset and unnerved by her appearance. We also see Brynn writing letters to her best friend Maude, and building a fantastic model version of the town in her own home, one that seems upbeat and idyllic. This is an activity she used to do as a child with her mother, and the tradition has continued.

Brynn’s insular bubble is popped one night when aliens invade the town and her home. She manages to kill one of them, and embarks on a quest for help. When she goes to the police she runs into Maude’s parents, and Maude’s mother spits in her face. It is clear that whatever past she had with Maude ended badly, so it seems odd that she’s still cheerfully writing her best friend letters.

In an effort to escape the nightmare of the alien invasion, Brynn also tries to leave town on a bus, but some of the other passengers reveal themselves to be possessed by alien creatures who want to capture Brynn, and she has to fight them off and run home. On her way back to the house, she stops by a graveyard, and we see Maude’s gravestone in full view. Something bad did indeed happen to Maude.

How Did Maude Die?

When the aliens finally manage to put one of their parasites inside Brynn, her mind is transported to a kind of heavenly place where she sees Maude again and apologizes to her (the only lines of dialogue spoken in the film) but when she reaches down her throat and pulls the creature out, Maude is gone.

At the end of No One Will Save You Brynn is finally captured and mind-probed by the aliens aboard one of their spacecrafts. Her memories reveal that she and Maude had an argument in the woods when they were 12 years old, and Brynn angrily grabbed a rock and struck Maude in the head with it. Maude died, and her parents were devastated. As Maude’s father was the town’s police captain, the circumstances of Maude’s death were likely known by everyone.

There was no ‘life in jail’ for Brynn as she was just a child when the incident occurred, so she continued to live in the town, ensconced in her parents’ old house (a different kind of prison) and falling into an easy fantasy world, where she could still talk to Maude through letters and learn to dance while limiting her contact with townsfolk who simply viewed her as a killer they weren’t interested in forgiving for her crime.

What Really Happens to Brynn at the End?

At one point towards the end of No One Will Save You, a double of Brynn is beamed down from an alien spaceship. The double stabs Brynn in the stomach, but she slices the double’s throat and kills it. The aliens are fascinated by Brynn, seemingly because they haven’t been able to control her, as they have done with the rest of the town.

While probing Brynn, they witness her making peace with her 12-year-old self over Maude’s death, and appear to be oddly touched by her story. They send Brynn back down to Earth, where she is still bleeding from her stab wound. She stares at the sky, exhausted.

Some might believe that Brynn dies at this point, and the rest of the ending is her last blissful fantasy, but if you look closely when we next see Brynn getting ready to go to town, she still has the cut on her head, and it is almost healed. This indicates that Brynn has indeed recovered from her injuries and that some time has passed.

We see that Brynn is no longer alone. Some of the townsfolk are helping with her gardening, and as she waves to them they clearly still have the parasites in their throats. They have a sheen of happiness while they are possessed by the aliens, at least on the surface, and wave back. Brynn now lives in an idyllic version of the town like the one she was building at the start of the film, where everything is wonderful, no one treats her like a disgraced killer, and she can do as she pleases. Patrolling alien ships pass above overhead, now benign and appearing to have no interest in meddling with Brynn or the town’s new status quo.