Su and Jack are Uber Millennials, and by that I mean if they Uber around their Brooklyn neighborhood they probably struggle with giving a poor rating to the driver even if the experience is horrible, because that driver is no doubt working a couple of jobs to make ends meet, and the last thing Su and Jack would want to do is negatively impact someone from the working class. Can you imagine the guilt?
You gotta love Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani). They’re just the nicest, sweetest, most caring and considerate couple you’d ever want to meet, as is established in the early going of Eleanor Wilson’s and Alex Huston Fischer’s pinpoint funny social comedy “Save Yourselves!”, a wry commentary about how some — note I said SOME — millennials might be the least prepared adults in history to cope with an alien invasion. (That’s right. More on that to come.)
Su and Jack have reached the point in the relationship where they’re comfortable lazing a day away on the sofa, not bothering to put on “grown-up” clothes, tethered to their phones and laptops. When they finally do go out, they reconnect with their old friend Ralph (Ben Sinclair), who runs a start-up company making 3D-printed, sustainable surfboards constructed from algae and has nearly completed, by hand, a renovation of a cabin in upstate New York. Ralph suggests Su and Jack stay at the place for a week — and, drunk on booze and intoxicated by Ralph’s do-something-REAL-with-your-life initiative, Su and Jack take up Ralph on his offer and agree to spend the entire week off the grid: no phones, no laptops, just being with each other and in the moment.
Mani (“Mr. Robot,” “GLOW”) and Reynolds (“Search Party,” “Stranger Things”) are wonderfully talented comedic performers, and they have an easy, likable chemistry as Su and Jack fumble about their apartment getting ready for the trip. What if they forget something? “It won’t be the end of the world,” says Jack as they finally head out.
Well. It might be.
Su and Jack settle in for a weekend of taking hikes, playing cards, getting a little high, breathing in the fresh air, stargazing and becoming one with nature while recharging their spiritual batteries. They are comically inept when it comes to canoeing or making a fire, but they’re extremely proud of themselves for making this grand gesture of unplugging from the world for one whole week. They’re also oblivious to the fact that alien predators — small, fluffy creatures that look like something out of an old “Star Trek” episode — have invaded the planet. (The light comedy in “Save Yourselves!” is occasionally interrupted by darkly funny episodes of various humans getting offed by the creatures.)
When Su and Jack finally realize that decorative thing in the cabin Su has dubbed a “Poof” has in fact been moving around and is trying to kill them, they have to switch to survival mode, and you can imagine how that goes. There’s a gun on the premises, but Jack reminds Su they’re not “gun people” and just having a gun in the house makes it 11 times more likely one of them will be shot. While Su and Jack debate the pros and cons of using the gun, you want to scream: “DIFFERENT TIMES, KIDS! YOU’RE UNDER ATTACK FROM ALIENS, GET THE FREAKIN’ GUN!” And when they find a car in the garage, even that presents a challenge because it has a manual transmission and of course, neither of them knows how to drive a stick.
Even the smaller touches in “Save Yourselves!” ring true, e.g., when Su listens to cell phone messages from her mother, who’s getting updates on the invasion from “Fox & Friends,” or when Jack laments he’s so bad at being an old-school, “manly man” he can’t even tell when a bathroom needs cleaning. On the run and doing battle with cuddly-looking beings that also have lethal, 20-foot tongues that can penetrate steel and kill you in an instant, Su and Jack bring a kind of 1930s screwball comedy energy to their frantic efforts to stay alive, and even though these two can be borderline insufferable with all their self-aware sincerity, we’ve come to know and like them, and we really hope they don’t get whacked by one of those relentless Poofs.
The Chicago premiere of “Save Yourself!” begins at 7 p.m. Monday at the ChiTown Movies drive-in, 2343 S. Throop St., and includes a live Zoom Q&A with the writer-directors. Tickets: https://www.elevatedfilmschicago.com
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‘Save Yourselves!’ review: Millennials vs. aliens in a wry social comedy - Chicago Sun-Times
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