Marriage is a high-stakes affair, sentencing participants to either a blissful happily-ever-after or a tragic figurative death. And it proves exceptionally perilous in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, a new Netflix series (streaming now) about a wedding with harrowing consequences.
Produced by Stranger Things creators The Duffer Brothers, Haley Z. Boston’s eight-part thriller synthesizes the maternal, the marital, and the macabre through the story of a young woman whose marriage to her true love proves decidedly unholy.
Led by Camilla Morrone (Daisy Jones & the Six, The Night Manager), it’s a mystery that hums, raising tantalizing questions about the spooky, supernatural goings-on at its remote locale and among its eerie characters. Alas, too often, the answers it provides are as underwhelming as its action is woefully underlit.
Though it seems unlikely to attract the sort of rabid fandom that greeted the Duffers’ previous phenomenon, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen gets off to an intriguing start. Set five days before “I Do,” behavioral psychology student Rachel (Morrone) and her fiancé Nicky (Adam DiMarco) drive to his family’s remote, swanky upstate New York vacation cabin, where their nuptials are scheduled to take place. They’re a happy pair, but their journey is one pockmarked by talk of both death and amour, including about a local custard shop magnate who was outed as a serial killer, and whose surviving victim states, in a podcast, that blood loss can lead to a feeling of euphoria, “the same way I felt on my wedding day… it was almost like love.”
Peculiar incidents pile up at an alarming rate in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen’s premiere, be it Rachel sketching the custard shop’s logo despite claiming to have never seen it, the discovery of an abandoned baby in an SUV at a rest stop, and Rachel’s run-in at a local bar (where she seeks help for the tyke) with an unnerving stranger (Zlatko Burić). At a diner, Rachel assumes that a couple’s conversation about missing dogs means that the guy killed them, chats about her deceased mother, worries about the pain of childbirth and having “haunted children,” and recounts a story about her dad’s girlfriend’s daughter, who at four years old said that she remembered her past life—a fact Rachel believes, since she says kids can exist in a third dimension where they can see the past and future.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is awash in bizarre and uncanny particulars even before it arrives at Nicky’s abode, where a creepy family portrait has the groom-to-be standing next to an empty chair (where Rachel’s image will soon be added).
Nicky’s dad Boris (Ted Levine) is a professional doctor and amateur taxidermist whose stuffed-animal handiwork decorates the cabin’s interior. Yet that’s not the weirdest thing about Rachel’s introduction to her new clan, whose members—matriarch Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), siblings Portia (Gus Birney) and Jules (Jeff Wilbusch), and Jules’ second wife Nell (Karla Crome) and son Jude (Sawyer Fraser)— are a uniformly odd bunch.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen establishes a portentous mood with each subsequent revelation, not to mention an uncanny score and performances that put a premium on off-putting eccentricity (and, in Portia’s case, outright rudeness).
It also thinks that dousing everything in abject darkness is a way to generate suspense. But as with so many TV offerings that hew to Netflix’s dimness-is-good house style (like last year’s Black Rabbit), the effect is to render much of the proceedings frustratingly obscure.
The show’s directors gussy up their malevolent material with a collection of recurring visual motifs (rotating shots around characters, spectral POV flights through forests and down hallways). However, given that the all-consuming murkiness makes it a chore to decipher details, much of that effort is for naught.
Morrone’s Rachel has a bad feeling about these festivities, and her instincts are spot on, albeit in a manner that only becomes clear once Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen firmly situates itself at Nicky’s familial getaway. Whether it’s bloody noses or a legend about a woodland fiend known as The Sorry Man, the show is practically drowning in ominousness. Yet more winds up being less, as Rachel is so beset by the inexplicable that it all feels like overkill. Still, the actress’s skillful turn prevents the series from spinning off in various haphazard directions and is the primary reason this nightmare stays beguiling for as long as it does.
Unfortunately, that’s not long enough. Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen gradually elucidates the root cause of Rachel’s woe, a confluence of cosmic and otherworldly forces.
If the creator were more interested in leaning into the irrationality of her premise, those explanations might have made a good hook for an early-2000s horror film. Spread over eight installments, however, they’re rather tepid, and Rachel and company’s responses to the threats they face are similarly unsatisfying, in large part because there’s nothing especially original about any of this mayhem.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen roots itself in ideas about marriage, parenthood, devotion, betrayal, mortality, and eternity, all while it wonders whether it’s dangerous to change oneself to foster a lasting union. That concern hangs over its later passages, as Rachel and Nicky struggle with a cornucopia of crises in the lead-up to walking down the aisle—an up-in-the-air ceremonial occasion that’s depicted, tantalizingly, at the series’ outset.
But the showrunner rarely does anything engaging with them, content to simply stretch out her mystery until it appears to be on the verge of snapping.
After much dawdling, Something Very Bad is Going to Happen delivers a payoff that’s as distended as the preceding drama, and just as empty.
Striving to conclude with a mordant commentary on the nature of love, partnerships, and soulmates, it offers up precisely what it’s been teasing in the most straightforward fashion imaginable.
Morone does her best to make Rachel a heroine whose fate is worth caring about, but even at the chaotic end, this wannabe conversation-starter is merely a ho-hum sort of happening.
