We Need To Do Something is an independent movie release on September 3, 2021. It was available both in theaters and streaming via video on demand. I was able to buy it on Amazon Prime for about $15. (You can rent it for like $7 if you don’t want to buy it.)
The plot for the movie is simple: A family of 4 gets trapped in their bathroom during a large thunderstorm. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. It’s not a lot to work with.
When I was looking at lists of scary movies released this year, Something sounded like it could be an interesting take on family dynamics. Unfortunately, the movie relies too much on the audience’s imagination. There are ways you can make a movie scary without showing the monster but you have to give us something to go on. All we get is family in-fighting, people describing things they see outside the bathroom, and vague flashbacks that might be the reason everything is happening.
And that is where the main problem lies - we don’t know what is happening. We don’t know how many days have passed since the family got stuck. They start fighting VERY quickly. It’s possible this whole movie takes place in 24 hours and we would never know. We also don’t know what terrible things are outside the door. The family is stuck because a tree fell on their house, blocking the bathroom door. (It occurs to me that every bathroom door that I know opens inward so the family wouldn’t have gotten stuck. Let me know if your bathroom door opens outward.) A couple of the family members, mostly the son and dad, make references to things they see outside the door but we only get a few sounds that don’t really match the descriptions and a bloody tongue. It’s not enough to allow us to decide what is actually outside.
On top of that, the story tries to give us a reason all of this is happening. However, they don’t really show us how the actions caused the consequences. Now, I get that this was filmed during Covid-19 so the cast was kept very small and they were confined to a soundstage. But we needed something more. It could have been a newspaper article talking about some of the events that Melissa (Sierra McCormick), the daughter, says happened. She says that one of her classmates died but her parents know nothing about it? That seems unlikely. As it is, we barely know the outside world exists.
To be honest, Something isn’t worth watching. It’s 97 minutes of boring nothingness. There are better ways to spend your time. Like maybe watching paint dry.