97 min | NR | September 3, 2021 | IFC Films
A family takes shelter in their bathroom when a violent storm hits. A tree falls across the only door and traps them inside. The thing outside is worse than the weather.
A storm drives Diane, Robert, and their two children into the family bathroom for safety. A fallen tree pins the door shut and the power dies. What starts as an ordinary emergency stretches into days. Sean King O’Grady builds the film around a single question. The danger outside the bathroom may be supernatural, and the danger inside the family is already real. The film is less about what the storm unleashes and more about a marriage rotting in close quarters.
Sierra McCormick plays Melissa as the teenager who suspects the storm is her fault. She carries a secret about a relationship and a ritual that may have summoned what waits outside. McCormick gives Melissa a guilt that curdles into defiance. Pat Healy plays Robert as a father whose menace surfaces the moment the door will not open. He drinks, he lashes out, and Healy makes the man more frightening than anything beyond the walls. Vinessa Shaw plays Diane as the mother trying to hold the family together while she calculates her own escape. John James Cronin plays young Bobby with the wide-eyed panic of a child watching adults fail.
O’Grady directs from a script by Max Booth III, who adapts his own novella. The single-location premise demands invention and the production design delivers a bathroom that grows more claustrophobic as filth and damage accumulate. The film flashes back to Melissa’s life before the storm and these cutaways break the trapped tension rather than deepen it. The sound design works hardest, with scratching and animal noises that keep the threat unseen. Ozzy Osbourne voices a snake the family encounters, a casting choice that signals the film’s appetite for the absurd.
The setup is strong and the central metaphor is clear. A family locked in one room reveals the cruelty it usually hides behind closed doors. The problem is the payoff. Booth’s script raises questions about the ritual, the creature, and the storm, then declines to answer most of them. The flashbacks dilute the pressure that the bathroom builds. The film has a sharp idea about domestic horror and a closing stretch that mistakes ambiguity for meaning.