1
Nov
2020
Save Yourselves!

Save Yourselves!

Su and Jack are a couple of normcore hipsters living out in New York’s trendy Brooklyn district. Wedded to technology and unable to put down their phones, even for the most trivial of things, Su convinces Jack that they needed a break from their online addiction. Fortunately, they bump into Jack’s friend Raph at a party, who offers them the use of his parents cabin out in the wilderness. -Wow! It’s a perfectly organic and serendipitous solution! However, as Jack and Su turn off their phones and put Siri to sleep, the two lovable yet unaware tech-heads find out that the world has turned in a very different direction since they went “offline”…

Rich with really quotable dialogue, Save Yourselves! is a fantastic slow-burn farce which parodies hipster values without ever ridiculing them.

Genteel humour and adorable daftness are the twin cornerstones of writer/directing team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s end of the world comedy, Save Yourselves! Seen through the eyes of two daft-yet-adorable hipsters drunk on good intentions and self-absorption, Save Yourselves! finds a unique tone in getting you to laugh along with its cast with rather than at them. You see, running throughout their script, all of Fischer and Wilson’s characters are trying to live “authentic lives”. Personally, nowhere is this more exemplified than in the brief appearance of Ben Sinclair as Raph, who lends Su and Jack use of his cabin. Like the hipster equivalent of the wise, old, surfer-dude who’s been out in the sun too long, when Raph starts expounding about the 3-D printed surfboards he’s making out of poisonous algae, it’s comic gold.

So, now shorn of Siri, Alexa and all their other technological hangers-on, actors Sunita Mani as Su and John Paul Reynolds as Jack, really cut into their characters. Still unable to firmly focus on the present and blindly fixated on the future, both actors’ performances revel in what amounts to a soft-hearted, stoner movie without the drugs. Whilst Sunita Mani initially steals your attention with Su’s circular logic, it’s on second viewing (yep, I’ve watched it twice) that John Paul Reynolds brings real heart to Jack, who is a man as challenged by his lack of machismo, as he is with his fledgeling bread-making skills.

In subtlely getting you to really care about and invest in Jack and Su as characters, Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have quietly a crafted a lo-fi yet sci-fi classic here. Rich with really quotable dialogue, Save Yourselves! is a fantastic slow-burn farce which parodies hipster values without ever ridiculing them. 

So, if you’re looking for a very different kind of comedy, featuring two leads with amazing onscreen chemistry and timing, then this is it. 

See it now before the world goes poof!