Save Yourselves! is yet another under-the-radar gem to show up for rent on Amazon Prime during these trying times for movie theaters and movie studios. First-time feature directors Fischer and Wilson surprise and delight with this low-budget sci-fi comedy.
The film is carried by its two leads. John Reynolds and Sunita Mani as Jack and Su are an early thirties couple from Brooklyn scrolling their way through their lives and their relationship. At a party, they catch up with an old friend (High Maintenance’s Ben Sinclair) who offers them his family cabin for a week. Jack and Su jump at the opportunity to get away and unplug, to mentally reboot their lives. Once there, Jack and Su struggle to exist phone-free, while Su attempts to explore their relationship with a list of activities she found on a website and copied into a notebook. It’s while arguing about whether the list constitutes breaking their cellphone sabbatical that they notice a fluffy pouffe in the cabin that wasn’t there before. When they finally turn on their phones again, they’re met with numerous texts and voicemails that, without spoiling too much, prove the pouffe—a furball-shaped alien creature—does not come in peace.
For a film that revolves around just two characters, Reynolds and Mani are perfectly cast. Reynolds (Search Party) typically plays the hate-able hipster to a T, but as Jack he embodies the floundering yet complacent modern city dweller. He wishes he knew plumbing even though he actively rebelled against his workmanlike father. Mani (GLOW) is equally unskilled, and even says as much. She’s great as Su, who just feels in a rut and wants to get out of it before she wakes up at 60 having done nothing with her life. Though these topics sound heavy, Jack and Su together (and the sharp script by the directors) make these relatable struggles somehow light and breezy.
In a typically disarming scene, Jack and Su are sitting on their couch while he looks at his phone as it plays Cate Le Bon’s enchanting song “Are You With Me Now” (appropriate). Su, in a moment of frustration, slaps the phone out of Jack’s hand. Stunned, Jack turns to look at her and says, “Thank you.”
There are countless scenes like this that are both funny and real, even as the sci-fi silliness ramps up to catastrophic levels. As Jack and Su’s search for serenity turns into a fight for survival, Save Yourselves! takes many unexpected turns, all the while staying grounded in the main characters’ flawed, and often hilarious, humanity.
