As residents of states in Tornado Alley know, the singular experience of hunkering down in the bathroom with your family as storm sirens wail can be frightening. It certainly is for the four-person fam of We Need to Do Something, but their sheer terror does not translate to the viewer, try as though director Sean King O’Grady might by adding a rather wily rattlesnake, disembodied voices and, well, other things.
Thick with tension among family members but not dread, the film traps the clan in the room for the duration, as a wind-transplanted tree blocks the one doorway out — effectively bringing the haunted house to them. Stress-reduced to knocking back Listerine, the father (The Innkeepers’ Pat Healy, who elevates everything he’s in) is ineffectual, which his may-as-well-be-estranged wife (Eyes Wide Shut’s Vinessa Shaw, ditto) does not let go unnoticed.
Her main concern is the safety of their children, little Bobby (John James Cronin, TV’s NOS4A2) and teen Melissa (Sierra McCormick, The Vast of Night), whose flashbacks of life outside these four walls are the only thing keeping the movie from a single-setting classification.
More often than not, We Need to Do Something’s title doubles as an audience demand. Indeed, not enough happens in 97 minutes to wring a winner, especially since it seems built for a half-hour TV episode; indeed, Max Booth III adapted it from his own novella. Similarly structured to 10 Cloverfield Lane, but without as much imagination or suspense, the film does climax with one hell of an image that wouldn’t be out of place in the better Elm Street sequels. —Rod Lott