Save Yourselves! (2020)
(On Cable TV, April 2021) One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to tear anyone away from their cell phones is the oft-repeated “What if I miss something important?” Hence the built-in irony in Save Yourselves’s premise of seeing a hip Brooklyn couple head upstate for a week-long digital detox… right before an alien invasion begins. Much of the film’s first half is a drawn-out joke, as background gags keep suggesting world-changing events even as our characters are too busy bickering to care. Thanks to funny, fast and hip execution from writers-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Save Yourselves is seldom dull even when its lead characters are at their most grating. Much of the film’s likability comes from the irresistible Sunita Mani as one of the two leads — compared to which John Reynolds’ irritating man-child character takes far more time to become sympathetic. But they eventually get there, and the film is at its best when its protagonists become mildly competent at understanding the alien threat and working together to fight back. Save Yourselves (which provides the punchline to one of the jokes in the film) makes the most out of a limited budget and restrained filming locations — the dialogue is good enough to be interesting by itself, and the structure of the film is solid enough to keep viewers invested. It does become quite a bit more serious in the third act, and I’m still mulling over what I think of the ending — it’s an expansive logical conclusion that fits into my idea of how Science Fiction conclusions should push the extrapolation to its limit, but part of me would have liked to see our now-likable hipster family go back to their apartment after such an experience and cope with that. Still, I liked Save Yourselves quite a bit. “Pouf on the roof!” still has me chuckling days later, and I won’t need too much prompting to watch anything else featuring Mani. What could have been an irritating one-joke film becomes something better than that, and the comedy treatment of the apocalypse is exactly what we need in Pandemic Year Two.
