“We’re Not Safe Here” (2025) starts with a shocking event without context before shifting to Neeta (Sharmita Bhattacharya), a teacher suffering from a creative block. When a fellow teacher, Rachel (Hayley McFarland), needs to talk one evening, Neeta invites her over and gets shaken after listening to Rachel’s story. Soon Rachel’s anxiousness infects Neeta. Prevention is better than inoculation so save yourself and do not watch this movie!
When people are making a movie, do they think it is good when it is not, or are they resigned to their fate and just happy to have a job? This cast commits to the bit and do their best to sell nothing. Bhattacharya depicts Neeta as if she is already on the precipice of something severing her from her prior functional self. Neeta is listless with bouts of fury. As an artist, Neeta looks at a canvas and waits for something to come to her, but nothing does, so she considers quitting and giving up on her dream.
Be careful what you wish for. Rachel has been missing school so when she calls Neeta, Neeta invites Rachel over, and Rachel accepts her invitation. McFarland is jumpy, desperate, distracted or slumps over like one of Neeta’s sketches. She tells a childhood story until the account stops at the present day. McFarland’s performance is eerie and will make viewers wait for the other shoe to drop. It never does for the audience, but it does for Neeta. Neeta is not entirely present until she focuses on Rachel. Neeta comes alive first as the attentive friend and ultimately as the shaken, terror-stricken person trying and failing to make sense of her sudden fears.
As a point of reference for what a normal teacher looks like, Sarah (Caisey Cole), another teacher and mutual friend of both women, provides an example. Sarah is a teacher who hangs out with Neeta before that fateful night and offers a testimonial regarding Neeta’s usual, exemplary behavior. Sarah exhibits a normal level of energy, maybe high energy, considering that after a workday with children and grabbing a drink with Neeta, she is off to her next event of the day instead of going home.
Arthur Higbee’s deep voice occasionally makes a cameo and is probably the scariest part of “We’re Not Safe Here,” but not for long. It is just another aspect of the visions that torment Neeta after Rachel’s visit. Margaret Wuertz plays a mysterious, menacing figure who utters a bunch of nonsense that amounts to nothing. There is no logic, not even oneiric logic. Just a string of images that strive to be unsettling but fall severely short of the mark. Chekhov’s sharp implement does not even deliver.
Writer and director Solomon Gray seems to be crafting a lesson about the dangers of friendship as a conduit to trauma, especially among girls and women. The danger lies in the willingness to be there for someone, and the other person’s desire to be free of torment more than they care about their listener’s well-being regardless of their preexisting relationship’s deep bonds. The tales are adjacent to real life horrors without resolution: the death of a loved one or an unsolved mystery. “We’re Not Safe Here” could also just be a product of seeing what is in Neeta’s overactive imagination after the fog lifts on her creativity, which makes her an onscreen surrogate for Gray, and he hopes his stories are as contagious as the ones that Rachel weaves. If this movie is a microcosm about the creative process, it would be nice to get a solid story as an example of one instead of a string of unfinished gimmicks that lead to nothing but disappointment.
The dialogue is frustrating because Rachel never finishes her story in one fell swoop, but it is not suspenseful. Before Rachel’s account of her story ends, Neeta tells her dream. Retelling the events of a dream are only of limited interest depending on how cohesive the story is, and how good the storyteller is hence the reason that you will find yourself wishing it would end already. There is zero payoff, and the ambiguity is aggravating.
Gray is a better director than writer because his sequences of still shots evoke the fear of something lurking at the corners just out of sight or someone watching the pair. Occasionally the camera angle indicates whether he is shooting from Rachel or Neeta’s point of view juxtaposed with an objective shot showing that nothing is there; thus, making them unreliable narrators. When he depicts their respective visions, it is not scary for long because the pattern gets established, and desensitization kicks in. Like a dream, if you are falling, before you hit the ground, you wake up. No sizzle. No steak. Just because they are occasionally awake when they have these moments does not make any of these images more compelling. After watching “We’re Not Safe Here,” it may have the opposite intended effect so if you see a bloody pillowcase lying on the ground or covering someone’s head, you may just keep it pushing as if there was nothing disturbing about it at all. That pillowcase is an understudy for the wolf in “The Boy Who Cried…” A lot of movies have strong, evocative atmospheres that drip with dread, but because Gray never delivers on the promise that these images make, the movie overstays its welcome, and the atmosphere is weak.
Even if you decide to be charitable and are determined to savor each subsection of their respective vignettes, the characters are too stupid to cheer on for long. For example, Rachel thinks something is menacing her, but when the two women hear a noise at the door, Neeta opens the door and looks around. Neeta lets Rachel stay in her home despite Rachel waking from her stupor, screaming and shaking Neeta. Sure, it is obvious that it is not an attack, but would you want someone in your house who possesses zero physical self-control. Also, if the point is for Neeta to ensure that Rachel is safe, leaving her alone defeats that purpose. Who goes out at night to investigate a strange house? Who goes into a house without an invitation and begins investigating then touching everything? Only the characters in “House on Eden” (2025) would, and they are not aspirational figures. It does not work overall, and it does not work in bite size pieces. All this hullabaloo is unconvincing as sufficient motivation to act like an idiot.
If there is any pleasure that can be derived from “We’re Not Safe Here,” it is from screaming at the screen for Neeta to stop acting like a numbskull and marvel at Rachel’s audacity. Most of Rachel’s activity in Neeta’s home is spent telling Neeta what to do, rifling through Neeta’s belongings or running around Neeta’s property leaving the front door open to make it easier for more quotidian menacing figures to walk right in though they wisely steer clear of the premises.
Watch “The Ring” (2002) instead. “We’re Not Safe Here” only delivers on the various locations, especially Neeta’s home and art. If you are a friend of anyone in the cast or the crew, you will probably walk away impressed because sustaining that level of performance and execution to essentially a concept with zero form is impressive, but it is a big waste. Stop the madness because life is short, and there is better content anywhere else. Boring AF.
