‘Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen’ Review: Creepy Netflix Horror

To hear the love songs tell it, finding one’s soulmate ought to be a warm, fuzzy, blissed-out experience. “How wonderful life is while you’re in the world,” croons Elton John. “You’re simply the best,” exclaims Tina Turner. “When you know you know,” sighs Taylor Swift.

But try telling that to a nervous bride in the days leading up to her nuptials, as it dawns on her just how much of her future she’s staked on the bet that her betrothed really is The One. Netflix’s Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, from creator Haley Z. Boston (Brand New Cherry Flavor) and executive producers Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer (Strangers Things), takes those pre-wedding jitters and amplifies them to supernatural extremes, eventually winding to a surprisingly thoughtful, satisfyingly bloody take on the impossibility of absolute romantic certainty.

From all outward appearances, Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco) do seem like a promising match. She is the morbid one, a ball of anxieties swaddled in black t-shirts and surrounded by an omnipresent puff of marijuana smoke. He is the clean-cut optimist, always ready with a reassuring answer or a lighthearted crack. Despite their opposing personalities, it’s clear they’re dialed into one another’s needs, desires, senses of humor. When they’re together, even a road trip pit stop for gas and coffee can feel like a flirty impromptu date, peppered with naughty jokes about blowjobs and playful musings about the kids they maybe hope to have someday.

And yet, Rachel senses, something is not right. As the couple near the Cunninghams’ big country vacation home, where they plan to have their wedding in five days’ time, ill omens seem to abound: overheard snatches of a disturbing conversation, a dead fox on the side of the road, a passing car scribbled with “just married” in paint the color of blood.

Then, once they actually arrive at Somerhouse, the bad omens turn to bad signs — including quite a literal one in the form of a card addressed to Rachel that reads, “DON’T MARRY HIM.” Nicky’s family, led by his self-absorbed mother Victoria (an egregiously underused Jennifer Jason Leigh), alternate between a distance toward Rachel that borders on disdain and an enthusiasm about the wedding that borders on invasive. There are stories of a knife-wielding, bride-killing monster lurking in the woods, which Nicky’s big brother (Jeff Wilbusch’s icy Jules) may or may not have encountered as a child. Even accounting for Rachel’s self-admitted tendency toward paranoia, it seems obvious there’s more going on than standard-issue pre-wedding awkwardness.

Boston and director Weronika Tofilska (who helmed the premiere episode, among others) draw out the gruesome undertones of familiar nuptial tropes with a sly and twisted sense of humor. Dress alterations are done in a frenzy of violent tears and sharp slices. A bespoke cedar altar looks from some angles like something out of a fairy tale, and from others (to the chagrin of Nicky’s snobbish baby sister Portia, played by Gus Birney) like something out of The Blair Witch Project. Amplified enough, the click of a wedding photographer’s camera might sound like a gun being loaded.

Something Very Bad cultivates its aura of dread less through graphic gore than through surprise and suggestion, from abrupt smash cuts that disorient our sense of time, to a soundtrack full of ballads that sound almost haunting in their lovesickness (Paul Anka’s “You Are My Destiny” is a key recurring track), to shaky camera angles that make us unwitting co-conspirators to some unseen someone or something. But as the plot turns gnarlier and then dips into the supernatural, it does not necessarily shy away from showing us, well, something very bad: a skinned animal, a severed body part, streams of blood.

Morrone proves herself quite an adept horror heroine, keeping Rachel grounded in a likable and earthy relatability even as her mental state spirals in direct proportion to the escalating terror around her. Opposite her, DiMarco plays Nicky as a variation of his breakout role on The White Lotus — he’s undeniably sweet but also perhaps a bit too eager to be seen as undeniably sweet. It’s to the performers’ credit that we find it almost as hard as Rachel does to tell whether they’re truly in love and just suffering cold feet under such chilling circumstances, or whether they’re not and she’s just trying to persuade herself she is because her life depends on it.

Around them, however, the ensemble has a more difficult time coming into focus. Birney makes an immediate impression as spoiled princess Portia, but then is offered nothing to do beyond offer semi-regular semi-comic semi-relief; similarly, Leigh has quite the entrance as an almost ghostly figure roaming the halls, but then is so thinly drawn that dialogue is required to explain that we’re supposed to find her extremely narcissistic. On the flip side, characters like Jules and his wife Nell (Karla Crome) and Nicky’s dad (Ted Levine) do get more intriguing as we learn more about them, but then aren’t granted enough screen time to grow beyond mere foils to Rachel and Nicky’s story.

The thinness of the characters is especially odd given that Something Very Bad has, if anything, too much time on its hands. In its plotting and structure, this often feels less like a series than a two-hour movie that’s been stretched to fill eight 45-minute episodes on the rationale that the latter would be easier to greenlight than the former. But the extra minutes go more toward stuffing the plot with unnecessary detours (like a metaphor-laden hunting trip) or extending necessary ones (like a library research trip) to two or three times their intuitive length.

And yet, I can’t say I was ever once bored. The show excels at casting a spell through odd details, nasty red herrings, disturbing clues. And underlying them all is an unexpectedly sincere exploration of what true love can or should feel like, pitched right on the knife’s edge between sentimentality and cynicism. Rachel has more reason than most to agonize over the question of how one truly recognizes a soulmate — whether it’s a question of fate or simply of making a decision, one of pure feeling or of some obscure and objective calculation. But the series works because these inquiries are no small matter for the rest of us, either. “’Til death do us part” is a romantic affirmation. It is also, Something Very Bad would note with an arched brow, something of a threat — a reminder even in a best-case scenario, it’s all bound to end in pools of blood and tears.