WE'RE NOT SAFE HERE - Mark Reviews Movies

We're Not Safe Here, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 21, 2025

With We're Not Safe Here, writer/director Solomon Gray tries to milk a single idea for everything it's worth. It's a good idea, to be clear, but the filmmaker's feature debut simply doesn't have much of a story to tell with it.

The basic premise is an old-fashioned ghost story of sorts, combined with the concept of a potentially recognizable urban legend. All of this is relayed by a single character in a single location over the course of the tale, with a few delays and interruptions to fulfill the familiar requirements of a horror movie. Gray proves himself pretty competent at establishing tension, but the need to constantly find ways to pay off that suspense, sometimes far too early within this slow-drip of a narrative, gets in the way of that effort.

After an eerie prologue that will be discussed later, we first meet Neeta (Sharmita Bhattacharya), an art teacher, it seems, at some small-town school. She's also an artist on the side, but as she tells fellow teacher Sarah (Caisey Cole) at a bar after work, Neeta is having trouble finding the inspiration to put paint to canvas. Her mother died recently, and since then, Neeta hasn't been able to create any new work. Sarah insists it's just a momentary creative block, but Neeta worries there's nothing temporary about it.

Little of this matters to the bulk of the narrative, which begins when someone knocks on Neeta's door in the middle of the night. It's Rachel (Hayley McFarland), another friend, who had earlier called Neeta looking for someone to talk to about something that has been troubling her. Outside the artist's house, Gray's camera sits in the driver's seat of Rachel's car, taking on the young woman's perspective, as a figure appears next to the car's window.

It's a familiar sight, since that prologue establishes a woman, gasping for breath with her face covered in a bloody pillowcase, before a knife slowly enters the frame right next to her veiled face. Soon enough, the camera pans from one window, across the windshield, and to the passenger side of the car, and along the way, there are copies of that same figure, with the red-soaked cloth over her head, at every key point of observation. There's a neat bit of choreography to the shot, too, as those figures move—closer to or farther from that point of view—with each successive turn of the camera.

This is all buildup to the movie's centerpiece scene, which amounts to little more than Rachel telling Neeta a story from her childhood—one that had haunted her for years, dissipated from her memory, and has now returned with unsettling force. Anyone who has ever sat with a group in a darkened room during a sleepover or around a campfire in the woods, as each member tries to scare everyone else with some spooky story they heard or that happened to some distant relative's friend, will recognize what Gray is doing here.

When the scene is simply about that, the filmmaker mostly succeeds in replicating that feeling, too. In part, that's because the story Rachel tells is simple, recognizable, and creepy enough, while the rest of it is in how McFarland's performance pinpoints the quiet lows and desperate highs of the lengthy monologue. The other trick, which is initially subtle, is how Rachel is occasionally distracted by something—a little noise that only she can hear—inside the house. If we didn't know what had happened in the car and that there is someone or something staring through the windows of the house while the story is being told, the uncertainty of those brief pauses might have built toward something.

That leads us to what is probably the material's undoing, apart from the fact that there really isn't much for the filmmaker to do within the limited confines of this tale. Gray gives away the game too early and too often for it to really get under our skin, in the way it certainly has for Rachel and gradually does for Neeta.

Basically, the movie tries to scare us with too little context and, since there's still more of the story to tell, a repeated sense of anticlimax. One of Rachel's breaks, for example, puts her in the bathroom, where the pillowcase-covered woman soon appears right in front of her. An unspoken mystery established by the ghost story and those visions is what's under that piece of blood-drenched cloth. Gray shows us before Rachel has finished her tale, and with that out of the way so early, a key element of both the uncertainty and the suspense has been undone.

To be fair, it probably would have been difficult to sustain the tension and momentum of We're Not Safe Here without those diversions, especially since the eventual plot, which sees Neeta trying to uncover the truth, is even thinner than Rachel's tale itself. Still, the strength of the movie's central sequence—ignoring those more egregious disruptions, of course—suggests Gray might have somehow pulled off the trick.

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