In short: We Need to Do Something (2021)

During a tornado warning, a family – mother Diane (Vinessa Shaw), father Robert (Pat Healy), teenage daughter Melissa (Sierra McCormick) and younger son Bobby (John James Cronin) – shelter from the storm in their big bathroom. In this sort of situation, family tensions do tend to escalate. It certainly isn’t helping that mom and dad are in one of those she cheats/he’s a prick kind of moments in their relationship, nor that Melissa seems particularly desperate about the health of her girlfriend Amy (Lisette Alexis). However, there’s worse things than being huddled up together with people one is supposed to get along with but doesn’t: quickly, the family are locked in by a fallen tree. They find themselves stranded in their bathroom for much longer than they reasonably should be, long enough that cannibalism might become something to talk about. It seems there’s something worse going on than a storm and its aftermath, with some thing sneaking around the periphery. And what’s with the flashbacks Melissa has to her teen romance with Amy?

If you wanted to be facetious, you might say Sean King O’Grady’s We Need to Do Something (with an excellent script by Max Booth III based on his own novella) is the best horror film about a family locked into their own bathroom ever made, a new highlight in bathroom films, even. However, the film has rather a lot more going for it than just this set-up, and turns out to be a bit of a tour de force through family problems, witchcraft, guilt, and what may or may not be a Weird apocalypse.

Tonally, there’s certainly a very dark, sardonic sense of humour on display, something that’s twisted and wry at the same time. The humour is never used as comic relief, but rather the opposite, a way to intensify and escalate the family catastrophe on display, as well as a method to help turn the circumstances our protagonists encounter stranger and more discomforting. There’s a finely drawn sense of ever increasing doom surrounding the family, the sense of forces from the outside pushing them just long and hard enough to tease out their inner weaknesses and lies, yet also twisting them and making them larger and less familiar than they should be.

The acting ensemble really gets into the very specific tone needed, grounding the increasing derangement on display in something that feels natural and real (not necessarily pleasant and easy, of course), so that the film’s stranger moments hit all the harder.

We Need to Do Something is, apparently, one of those films particularly not for everyone. I suspect its tone simply will not work for everyone (which seems perfectly alright to me), nor will its approach to ambiguity and resolutions make everybody happy. Me, I felt rather at home here, or as at home as the circumstances portrayed allow.