Setting your film in a very limited space has its risks. All of the usual components – your characters, your pace, your plot – will be held to the utmost scrutiny, with no sweeping vistas or changing scenes to distract the eye. It’s certainly gone wrong in the past; get it right, however, and you deliver a sharp, focused and rigorous piece of storytelling. We Need To Do Something Falls into the latter category. It’s wicked, it’s incredibly engaging and it feels quite dizzying, despite taking place more or less in one room.
We meet our main characters as they’re entering this room – the family bathroom – and the film begins. They are sheltering there due to an incoming tornado, and it’s apparently the toughest room in the house. There’s not much time to preapre, it seems, so mother Diane (Vinessa Shaw), dad Robert (a riotous Pat Healy) Bobby Jr (John James Cronin) and teenage sister Melissa (Sierra McCormick) all rush to barricade themselves ahead of the storm. It’s a bad one: at its peak, it fells a tree which lands on the family home, wedging the door shut. Try as they might (and dad really tries) the door will not budge.
So they’re stuck. Without food. The power is intermittent. They do at least have running water still, but Diane puts her faith in the fact that someone will soon come along to help them. Dad passes the time swigging alcohol and lashing out at his family, and Melissa quietly panics about her lack of contact with girlfriend Amy. Before too long, the situation has very negative vibrations, and it’s increasingly uncomfortable. Still, no one comes. Each member of the family copes with this differently, but the tension is palpable.
It’s testament to this cast and to the direction that I could have quite happily followed this story as it stands, watching to see which family member cracks first (and Pat Healy is jaw-dropping here, a hectic blend of Al Bundy and Jello Biafra). It could also have turned into a very different kind of ordeal, something like Crawl, and it throws some of this in there for good measure. But the film happens to be based on a horror novella which goes far beyond mere confinement as the source of its horror. In keeping with the novella, it transpires that this is, perhaps, no regular storm. The house seems to be under assault by something quite different, and via Melissa, we are able to piece together what this could be…
Whilst the main story unfolds in the bathroom, through the select use of flashbacks we do get to glean more context and this comes to us through Melissa, who moves into ascendance as the story’s key character. Sierra McCormick is more than equal to this, doing a great turn as an at first disinterested teen, before revealing there is far more to her. Her flashbacks also allows the film to extend its reach, showing some horrific, grisly content and fleshing out the plot with some well-realised occult material (occult and left-field publishers Feral House were consultants for these scenes, and it shows). The skill shown in linking flashbacks to the current moment is impressive; things come together in just the right way here, leading to a brilliant crescendo. All of these things take directorial confidence and the end result, without giving anything away, joins the dots in a really engaging way. The level of exposition offered is just right.
We Need To Do Something is terrifically innovative, solid and entertaining. It’s a riot. Listen out for that scream-worthy Ozzy Osbourne cameo, too! A film I can’t wait to rewatch, and my personal favourite of the festival.
We Need To Do Something screened as part of the Celluloid Screams film festival in Sheffield, UK.