Some things are old, some things are new, and quite a lot is borrowed in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. The Netflix limited series, about a rather unholy matrimony, positions itself as a new horror-genre riff on the perils of a modern-day woman becoming a wife in the way that Carrie is about a girl becoming a woman and Rosemary’s Baby is about a woman becoming a mother. The series, perhaps, reveres those films a bit too much, resulting in an amusing spookfest that’s nonetheless about as fresh as a slice of leftover wedding cake.
Created by Haley Z. Boston and co-executive produced by the Duffer brothers, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen chronicles the days leading up to Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky’s (Adam DiMarco) wedding at his family’s rustic-chic estate in upstate New York. Rachel is prone to paranoia (the couple’s meet-cute origins three years prior involved her having a panic attack before boarding a flight), which is intensified as a menagerie of genre signifiers is thrown her way en route to the ceremony, including disemboweled animals, peeping toms from hell, and the legend of a blubbering maniac compelled to carve brides open on their big day.
Meeting Nicky’s family for the first time doesn’t exactly assuage Rachel’s sense that something’s off—not, at least, in the way that sucking on the end of a joint or engaging in some kinky storage-chest foreplay appears to. Led by icy matriarch Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the grumpy Boris (Ted Levine), the Cunninghams seem overeager to make sure the tatted-up and creeped-out Rachel adhere to their bloodline’s longstanding, not-so-feminist traditions. The Cunninghams may be hopeless at properly lighting their shadowy wilderness McMansion, but they’re bona fide pros at gaslighting the bride-to-be.
There’s plenty of dread-inducing fun to be had in the early episodes, despite their reliance on well-worn genre tropes. But Boston unveils the “very bad” something of the title surprisingly early, and the twist is altogether much sillier—and a bit more contrived—than what the show’s eerie opening stretch suggests. The result is like attending a wedding in reverse, where the rollicking reception gives way to the obligatory, somewhat sluggish ceremony.
Though the scares die out for the most part after the initial episodes, the fallout of this reveal transforms Rachel from a wide-eyed, Rosemary Woodhouse-lite victim into a plucky heroine with several difficult, yet appealingly bonkers, decisions to make and supernatural rituals to try out. Morrone is much better equipped for this side of her character than the neurotic mess we’re constantly told she is, and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen regains its footing by the time we reach the bloody nuptials promised in its opening scene’s flash forward.
With a wry sense of humor about itself, the series isn’t shy about insisting that the anxiety of not fully knowing the man you’re marrying (or the family you’re marrying into) is no match for the far more nightmarish existential phenomenon of realizing you’re no longer merely an individual but now someone else’s “soulmate.” Something very bad indeed happens when we cede our independence to an archaic institution that keeps us from parting with our supposed beloveds forever—or, at least until our glorious, perhaps gruesome, demises cut forever short.
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