Bleecker Street
There’s a kind of insufferability to both some sorts of hipster millennial personalities and the way they are often portrayed in clichéd ways in pop culture. Some of that is the nature of people that are now no longer young adults but simply adults, crossing that mystical boundary of age 30 or so. But there are also universal elements to the modern world that everyone that’s old enough has, like being overly connected to the digital world and social media — that’s really everyone to some extent. So how do you comment on it without being annoying?
Save Yourselves! comes from writer/director pair Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, in their debut feature film. It’s an indie movie with a smaller budget, so despite the sci-fi nature to it, things are small scale and often implied. We start the movie meeting our two main characters, a couple in what is assumed to be NYC in their particularly modern jobs. Jack (John Reynolds) is tall with a well-coiffed mustache and glasses, with a kind of frustrated energy he can’t define, while his girlfriend Su (Sunita Mani) hides from herself and her own potential to fail.
Right at the start, we see a scene where a potential romantic encounter between them is interrupted and the two simply end up staring at their phones. So we have our theme: Our devices, etc are ironically disconnecting us from each other. Not a new idea by any stretch, but then the movie goes much further to imply that perhaps this culture of connection is also causing our own destruction — also not entirely a new idea, but a more important one.
At a party, Su and Jack talk to a bearded friend of theirs, a former investment banker turned hippie ‘giving back’ type, who happens to have a classic cabin in the woods. And that cabin happens to be available. Su and Jack love this idea of getting away from it all, even if it’s a bit of an ‘adventure’, but then when Su gets fired for trying to take a week off, it’s more of a push to get out of the city.
The cabin is nice with all the stuff they’ll need, and the views and weather are beautiful. But as the two bicker and try to relax in the disconnected realm, something is going on in the background that they are missing or ignoring — an alien invasion. The specifics are never completely explained, but it’s not the point — the two eventually stumble across puffy spherical beings that seem benign but of course, are not at all.
So the movie goes from a standard commentary on the modern world to an alien survival tale, all in a small scale as the couple tries to stay alive. The humor at first comes from both their ignorance of the big threat juxtaposed with their attempts to be cool outside people. Eventually the humor really goes away and it becomes a bit more straightforward in the sci-fi realm, but for a while, it’s quite an enjoyable sort of story.
Su and Jack both have elements of their personalities that are annoying, but they aren’t terrible or selfish people (unlike some we later see), so we can empathize with their efforts and legitimately care about them surviving the whole mess. John Reynolds seems tailor-made to play the sort of near-asshole hipster type, but his nervous tics belie a more understandable set of issues that we learn about it. Of course, Sunita Mari is great on GLOW and she’s great here too, a gifted physical and verbal warrior of comedy, and my only comment about her performance is that she should be in more stuff.
Overall, it’s still a ‘quirky’ movie, which is a turn-off for some people, but as a sort of lightweight ‘end of the world’ comedy, it’s pretty decent — reminds me a bit of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, although that had more complicated special effects. If you don’t mind the quirky style, it’s a decent inclusion in the indie world of such things — it’s a romantic couple you probably won’t hate.
Save Yourselves has a run time of 1 hour 33 minutes and is rated R for language.
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