Film review: Save Yourselves! (2020)

How you feel about this film will depend largely on whether or not you are a holist.  That is, if you require that your film be a complete entity, with a beginning, middle, and satisfying end, then you're probably not going to like it, because clearly the writers just had no idea how to end it.  If, on the other hand, you can see the trees for the forest, there is much to like, certainly in the first half.  Basically it's a John Wyndham-style "cozy catastrophe," carried almost entirely by the two leads, who are Millennials to an almost cartoonish degree.  Fortunately, they, "Su" (Sunita Mani, whom you will recognize if you have seen Glow on Netflix) and "Jack" (John Reynolds, from the excellent Search Party) are very able and engaging performers and carry the film with no apparent effort. The basic conceit is that our two heroes are stuck in Millennial malaise, living in Brooklyn and doing ill-defined web-based jobs of some sort, and constantly staring at some screen or other (or having Alexa/Siri play them whatever they demand).  

Then, when they go to a party (the one occasion when there are multiple other people in the film) they run into "Raph," an ex-broker who now jets between Patagonia and his dad's cabin in upper NY State, which he's been renovating, and which he offers to them as a place to decompress.  They take him up on it and make a pact to disconnect entirely for a week, no laptops or phones.  They leave joint voicemail messages to that effect on the way up, not noticing the strange streaks in the sky.  They do notice an abnormal amount of shooting stars the first night, sitting out by the fire they have failed to light (as they both note at various points, they have no skills - Jack even fails at chopping wood), but think nothing of it.  While sitting out, Jack partakes a little too much of the whiskey, against Su's advice, because he gets night terrors when he drinks.  And he does, sitting up in bed and shouting about being attacked.  The second day is hard: they try various things to unwind, but Jack realizes that all Su's suggestions come from a list she copied off the internet before they disconnected, and that's cheating.  Then, when Jack is out at his failed attempt to chop wood, Su sneaks a listen to her voicemail and it's rather alarming: it's her mother saying something about rats not actually being rats, and how they eat anything ethanol.  But then Jack comes in so she hastily hides the phone, and he has been thinking, and decides that they should try to open up, and a good start is making a confession.  His confession is that he knows he fails as a "traditional" man (unlike his dad, who is apparently very handy), but that he also fails as a "new" man because he doesn't listen well.  Having unburdened himself, he advises her to admit some thing she has not been honest about, however small, because it feels great to get it off your chest.  Of course we think she's about to admit the phone thing, but instead she blurts out that she eats her contacts when she's done with them, a gross but strangely plausible admission.  The rest of the day passes well, with them cozily cohabiting and doing puzzles and playing cards, although at one point Jack does get freaked out by a "pouffe" (I'm glad to hear that that wasn't a term that my grandmother invented, but instead genuinely refers to a shaggy ottoman) that he swears wasn't there before, 

but once again he drinks too much and again sits bolt upright in bed to yell about being attacked by lions.  Only this time, out of focus in the shadows of the room, it looks like the pouffe is there, when it was downstairs before...  And when they come down in the morning, the whiskey is gone, along with Jack's precious sourdough starter (the one thing he can do).  Su looks thoughtful and asks if both of those things contain ethanol, and they encounter the pouffe again, and when they try to grab it with those tongs you use for firelogs, it fires an incredibly long thing sticky tongue at the wall and pulls itself up and then out of the door.  And that's when Su admits about the phone.  They find that neither of their phones gets service any more, but because Su used it yesterday, she downloaded all the messages she had then, and they include increasingly desperate messages from her mother, and one from Jack's mother saying that she and his father were escaping on his boat and would pick him up if he got to a port and messaged him that day (now yesterday).  There were also a couple of messages from Raph, one that begins with a horrible grinding noise before he comes in saying "sorry, just making a smoothie".  He says he's going to come up and hang with them, but the next message makes it clear that he can't get out of New York and thinks he's pretty much doomed and they're probably already dead anyway. There were also texts from their friends that reveal that (a) one of them is "dwad" and (b) everyone was going to meet up at Yankee Stadium but that it's been destroyed!  There follow scenes of panic, one involving them trying out the gun Raph reveals is in the basement and deciding that they can't be trusted with it, and another when they try to make a getaway in their car, only to find a tiny hole in the gas tank where the "pouffe" has drunk all the gas.  Eventually, after another pouffe gets in the house, they run to the barn and find an old diesel Land Rover, and drive off in that.  This is where things get a bit more serious, as they witness the pouffes use their tongues to pith the brains of a couple in a car (whose gas they drink) leaving a hidden passenger (who steals our heroes Land Rover at gunpoint) and a baby.  And then the movie gets weird, right up to a very weird ending, that is in no way satisfying.  In defense, I can imagine the film makers saying "well, if Kubrick can end 2001 with that weird bedroom scene and the giant fetus, why can't we have a strange, inconclusive ending?  To which I say: you better sell your movie as a little more Tarkovsky and a little less mumblecore before you can get away with that.  Shame: if this was the pilot episode of a series, I'd be perfectly happy.