While watching Save Yourselves! on my Apple TV, my laptop balanced precariously on my lap and my phone lighting up in the darkness once in a while to inform me that someone has replied to a tweet of mine, I found myself in a situation that the two leads of his adorable romantic comedy could understand. I might be too connected. Distractions abound; a fact that caused me to pause my movie a few times in order to respond to someone’s witty reply or confirm to a friend that, yes, I will meet them for a social-distancing outdoor dinner. I found myself longing for a weekend retreat to a cabin in the woods where I could simply disconnect.

Hopefully, my experience wouldn’t be as life-threatening as it is for the couple in Save Yourselves!, a movie that flirts with science fiction but never quite commits to the genre, instead using it as a way to explore relationships.

Lounging on a couch in their New York apartment, their legs intertwined with each other, Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) are at the stage in their relationship where they are simply content to physically be with each other while mentally engaging with their phones. In fact, they spend more time focused on the technology around them than each other, from the dozens of tabs on Su’s computer that Jack accidentally closed (gasp!) to Alexa reading to them to Google providing them with an answer to any question.

At a party celebrating the upcoming marriage of a friend, one of the guests sums up the existential ennui of their lives perfectly: “our individual lives are meaningless if you think about it...but only if you think about it.” They don’t feel like they need to try anymore and they’ve become complacent; their technology distracting them from realizing they’ve hit a bump in their relationship. While at the party, Jack sees an old friend he hasn’t seen in ages named Raph (Ben Sinclair). Raph is the kind of man Jack wishes he could be. He stepped away from a lucrative job as an investment banker to travel the world, making surfboards out of the bad kind of algae. As Jack would say, who even knew there was a bad kind of algae?! I’d Google it if I weren’t writing right now (ed: Google came through).

Feeling inspired after Raph offers them his grandfather’s cabin that he’s been renovating with his own two hands, Jack and Su make plans to disconnect. They leave their laptops and connected devices at home and drive out to the cabin, stopping at a gas station to leave a cutesy dual voicemail greeting (“Bye world!”). And just as they turn their phones off and get back in their car, they miss swarms of white, wispy objects shooting silently through the sky overhead. It’s Day One of “the year when humankind lost planet Earth” and Jack and Su have absolutely no idea…

Save Yourselves! takes sci-fi concepts and aliens and uses them as a metaphor for growing up and starting a family. For most of the runtime, the film is more of a relationship comedy about two thirty year olds contemplating an unknowable future of weddings and children than it is a science fiction, end of the world narrative. Instead of a hard sci-fi invasion film, the script by writers/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson use the genre trappings as a way of exploring millennial fears. In one of the more telling exchanges, Su tells Jacks, “You’re 34 and what are you doing?”, while noting that she’s thirty and her mother had three kids by her age.

Tradition and generational disconnect causes friction as Jack, cognizant of the stereotypes of masculinity and, in particular, toxic masculinity, still wishes he knew how to “be a man.” He compares himself to his father, who knows how to do stuff and build stuff and fix stuff. And while he’s content with himself, he still feels inadequate when faced with the terrible situation they increasingly find themselves in. At one point, he tries to take his anger out on a wood pile, but can’t even chop a lone chunk of wood.

In an adorable homage to Star Trek’s Tribbles and the creatures from Critters, the aliens in Save Yourselves! look like furry ottomans. In fact, the duo mistake the alien the first time they see it as a pouffe. The Pouffes are incredibly adorable...when they’re not attacking with their elongated tongue-like, blood-draining proboscis. With such low-fi creature design, the film doesn't really on many flashy effects, though an instance or two of violence features glorious spurts of blood.

But Save Yourselves! doesn’t need flashy effects because it has a pair of actors who are phenomenal at creating an authentic couple. Their relationship feels so lived in that at one point, Jack tells Su he just pulled out a gray nipple hair (“woo!” Su responds, affectionately). John Reynolds and Sunita Mani are fabulous and their onscreen chemistry carries the film. Without them, I’m not sure the film would work as well as it does because the sci-fi set pieces are so slight and is used mostly as a conduit for the pair to and confirm confront their ideologies and determine what kind of people they want to be in a world filled with hairy pouffes. Save Yourselves! is absolutely a satire of millenials, it never feels mean-spirited. In fact, it feels authentic as it explores this generation’s fears. And while the ambiguous ending proves that the writers were more interested in their characters than the science fiction trappings, it feels like a perfect summation of the ending of their previous lives and the start of something new, scary and completely uncertain.