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.

In short: Family Blood (2018)

Ellie (Vinessa Shaw), a recovering pill addict, has apparently only just gotten back the custody rights for her kids Kyle (Colin Ford) and Amy (Eloise Lushina). The family has moved to a new city, Ellie has a new job, but relations between her and the kids are strained – Kyle’s going the whole teenage rebellion route and Amy is growing up too quickly – and her struggle with her addiction is on less than stable footing.

One night, when she’s falling off the wagon right after an Addicts Anonymous session, another AA member, Christopher (James Ransone), assaults her and turns her into a vampire for vague and messed up reasons all of his own. Turns out, people who already can’t cope with more typical addictions are badly prepared for vampirism, so the family relations are going to become even more strained than before.

By now, films about vampirism as addiction or addiction metaphor have become their own subgenre. I suspect, right this moment more of them are being made than ones about romantic bloodsuckers. The thing is, once a sub-genre reaches this kind of saturation point, a perfectly innocent and decent little addict vampire flick like Sonny Mallhi’s Family Blood isn’t just a scrappy little underdog of a movie anymore, but goes to bat against films that are genre-defining or just plain great. Watching something like it, I can’t help but ask myself questions like “what does this add to the idea of vampirism as addiction?”, or “how different is anything in it compared with the last half dozen movies in the subgenre I have seen?”. Family Blood’s main problem is that the answers to these questions are “not much” and “it’s less well realized”, leaving me with a film working in a genre with rather tight borders – there’s really only so much you can do with the theme – that does little to actually stand out.

It’s a bit disappointing, really, for the acting is rather alright, the film looks pretty (there are indeed some outright beautiful shots), and up until the final act, it does very little that’s actually wrong. Rather, there’s nothing about anything going on in it that goes beyond the tropes and plot beats you’d expect from it, the usual concerns about family and vampirism playing out pretty much as is traditional.


The final act, though, isn’t just not good enough: it is a total mess where characters change their motivations randomly, a hilariously staged death of a barely characterized side figure is supposed to evoke a heavy emotional reaction in the audience that isn’t laughter, and all ideas the film might end up saying anything worthwhile at all about addiction and its impact on families go out the window. Worse still, the film seldom manages to work as a horror film despite being about something downright traumatic. It never really digs into the inner lives of its characters, only ever skimming the surface level.

In short: Cold in July (2014)

The life of peaceful Texan family man Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is turned upside down when he shoots an unarmed burglar in a moment of panic. This being Texas and all, the law doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with that – in fact, much less of a problem than Richard’s conscience has – but the burglar’s ex-con father Russell (Sam Shepard) is a bit of a different case.

Russell performs the expected threatening postures, and he’s clearly out for revenge but the situation will turn out to be quite a bit different from the semi-remake of Cape Fear one might now expect.

And that’s pretty much the point where Jim Mickle’s film turns out to be much more interesting and worthwhile than the extremely competent but unsurprising film it seems to set itself up as initially. It’s also just the first time the plot takes a turn into an unexpected and more interesting direction, always executed without the carnival huckster gestures of the twist-based movie but with a naturalness and matter-of-factness that can’t be easy to pull off, particularly not when played for a genre-savvy audience. It’s not as if each single element of the plot were terribly original in itself – in fact we’ve seen all these elements before in different films – but the way Mickle’s and his usual writing partner’s Nick Damici’s script (and I suppose the Joe R. Lansdale novel the script is based on) put these well-worn elements together feels new and fresh, and Mickle’s direction (working inside the 80s influenced not really retro style that’s popular right now, I suspect in part as a reaction against all movies being yellow and washed out) provides an unshowy and flawless drive to the proceedings. 

At the same time, the film is highly character-based with even the plot’s more dubious moments, as well as the characters’ many ethically questionable decisions, developed as natural results of what these characters here are, or are in the process of becoming. While this is a vigilante movie of a kind, it is, pleasantly, not one that wants or does preach the beauty of taking the law into one’s own hand; as a matter of fact, the film isn’t interested in asking ethical questions in an abstract way but rather in showing what these particular characters do when confronted with their specific ethical problems; and what these characters do isn’t meant to be a manual for the audience’s own lives.

The actors involved here are of course a huge part of this effect, with Hall (who to my eyes is one of the greats right now) and Shepard going the more naturalistic route they’re so damn good at, while Don Johnson uses the larger than life approach that has served him quite well in the last few years. Somehow, these very different acting approaches gel excellently too.

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