We Need to Do Something (2021) Ambitious lockdown Horror with one twist too many (Review)

The title of Sean King O’Grady’s movie, released on digital platforms by Blue Finch, is a statement of purpose. It’s one of a growing number of movies made during lockdown, by creatives who’d seen larger projects cancelled during the pandemic and decided that they needed to… well, you’re ahead of me here. These projects have varied massively in approach, from Netflix’s short film anthology Homemade to Charles Band’s tonally somewhat different Corona Zombies, but it’s notable that the most successful ones treat the pandemic allusively, if at all. Adam Mason’s Songbird, which centres around a “Covid-23” pandemic, was greeted with a chorus of groans, but Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth briefly establishes a world of testing kits and disinfectant stations before going off on its own, impressively wayward, path. Even Rob Savage’s Host, which is set entirely during the first lockdown, only really uses coronavirus to answer the age-old horror movie question of why the characters don’t just leave the house when things start to get scary.

We Need to Do Something takes it a step further. Its central characters are trapped in a house together, we know why O’Grady chose this format, and we may – if we’ve had an unusually harsh lockdown – recognise echoes of our own confinement in the action. But there is no mention of Covid in the film, nor even a fictional virus standing in for it. Indeed, the question of what, exactly, is keeping the family from leaving the bathroom is the film’s central mystery. At first, it appears to be a tree, toppled by a tornado and blocking the door. As the film goes on, though, the threat becomes more supernatural.

O’Grady has a solid career as a producer, with noteworthy indies like Lake Bell’s In a World… and Kitty Green’s The Assistant on his resume. As a director, he’s mostly worked on documentaries, with We Need to Do Something his first fiction feature. A one-location horror movie is a famously good idea for a debut film – ask Sam Raimi or George A Romero. Yet for all their cinematic inventiveness, those directors were telling fairly simple stories. We Need to Do Something has a twist-packed, genre-hopping plot adapted from Max Booth III’s novella, and it requires some kind of psychological insight in order to sell its protagonists’ descent into insanity.

The plot will be a matter of taste. I admired the film’s courage in frequently going for big, bold, shocking twists, but whereas (say) Takashi Miike’s films can feel thrilling in their disregard of conventional genre rules, We Need to Do Something just feels jumbled. The threat should feel like it’s escalating continually, but instead, it goes back and forth; once O’Grady and Booth have massively upped the ante with an unclassifiable, demonic menace outside the bathroom door, they inexplicably double back to deal with a rattlesnake that’s threatened the family previously. There will be some people who enjoy this grab-bag approach, and the ending is admittedly very far from what I expected. It’s just that part of the reason why it’s a surprise is that it deals with a theme that hasn’t been threaded through the film enough to justify the grand finale to revolve entirely around it.

The acting is similarly uneven. Sierra McCormick, fresh off her starring role in The Vast of Night, does a good job as Melissa, taking a role that could have degenerated into a series of moody-teenager cliches and giving it real spark, energy and even a sense of humour. She also gets the benefit of the few flashbacks, which I thought could have been spread out more evenly. Perhaps this was simply impossible given the circumstances, but the family’s disintegration would have carried more weight if we had more of a sense of who they were before this disaster struck; Vinessa Shaw and John James Cronin, in particular, suffer from a lack of space afforded to their characters. As the paterfamilias Robert, Pat Healy is indulged a little too much. The normally reliable star of Them and Compliance gets through about three minutes of confinement before he’s screaming obscenities and flailing manically against the door, a descent swift enough to make me wish for a farcical resolution where it’s revealed the family have only been trapped for a quarter of an hour or so.

We Need to Do Something is handsomely-made – the only sign that O’Grady wasn’t working with a Hollywood-sized budget is the essential fact that it’s all set in a bathroom. It’s full of ideas and plays even the wackiest ones with an admirably straight face. The problem comes with their lack of organisation. I’ve seen horror films that tell much less coherent stories than this – hell, I like Dario Argento – but they generally manage to create a consistent mood and forward momentum that makes them feel cohesive. O’Grady isn’t there yet, but you have to give him credit for something: during lockdown, he was clearly able to think about something other than Covid.

THANKS FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING

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