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| Courtesy of IFC Midnight |
Pink-haired disaffected teenager
Melissa (Sierra McCormick), also secretly a cutter in a relationship with her
goth-witch girlfriend Amy (Lisette Alexis), is the most-sane of this bunch of
dysfunctional miscreants. Including but
not limited to abusive and domineering alcoholic father Robert (Pat Healy), an
annoying younger brother Bobby (John James Cronin) and her mother Diane who may
or may not be cheating on her husband, soon this foursome grow increasingly
desperate with no food or way out and no privacy. When poisonous snakes start creeping in and Robert
starts drinking Listerine, madness and potential murder gradually begins to set
in. Moreover, Melissa herself begins to
wonder whether or not her witchy girlfriend who conducted a blood ritual with
her at one point might have something to do with her newfound entrapment.
Shot entirely in secret on a soundstage
located in Michigan at the height of the pandemic, the film though based on a
preexisting work adapted prior to COVID-19 wound up drawing influence from the
effects of being boxed in during the lockdown and whether it means to or not
serves as an allegory for our trying times.
As such, the film starts out intensely and grows increasingly heavy as
the circumstances grow more dire. And
yet despite a nerve-wracking score by William Hawkins Finn and wonderfully
claustrophobic cinematography by Jean-Philippe Bernier, one gets the sense at
the heart of this nightmare is a class clown ready to put one over the
audience.
Including but not limited to a demonic
voice of some sort of “creature?” voiced by Ozzy Osbourne and very prominent
on-the-nose use of Taco’s 1983 cover of Puttin’ On the Ritz on the film’s
soundtrack, despite how awful things get you feel the film’s tongue firmly
planting itself in cheek, inviting you to just laugh off the whole thing as a
snarky affront. But that’s not to say
the viewing experience is something to shrug off.
The performances from all five cast members,
particularly Pat Healy, are very strong with Healy going out on a madcap limb
as the mounting pressures of being trapped with his family become too much for
him. Sierra McCormick represents a strong
young lead, tasked with navigating the character Melissa’s own neuroses through
her already highly dysfunctional family.
And of course Vinessa Shaw is no stranger to horror having been in both
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as well as Alexandre Aja’s remake of The
Hills Have Eyes.
A lean, mean microbudget indie machine
that exploits its budgetary and technical limitations very well, We Need to
Do Something offers a glimpse into the feelings we all experienced during
the 2020 lockdowns and how helpless we felt at the height of it. On the other hand, somewhere along the way a
gremlin shows up sticking his tongue out and making raspberry sounds, daring you
to detach yourself and find this whole ordeal mordantly funny. That observation may frustrate some viewers,
not unlike the wolfman detour Ken Russell’s Altered States takes
mid-picture, but in the end We Need to Do Something makes for a halfway
decent exercise in chamber piece tension about what might happen when we’re all
boxed in together with no escape.
--Andrew Kotwicki
