When Rachel (Camila Morrone) sets out to celebrate her wedding, it isn’t a big deal. She and her fiancé, Nicky (Adam DiMarco), are driving out of the city to his parents’ house in the woods for an intimate ceremony with his immediate family. That’s it. That’s the whole plan. They’ll get married, enjoy the weekend, and then, presumably, get back to the same life of ordinary coupledom they’ve been enjoying for the past three years. The dress hanging in the backseat of their station wagon is her only invited guest, and even that doesn’t have to make an appearance on her not-so-big day.
But, as tends to happen when a few individuals try to minimize an event most people prefer to maximize, the wedding quickly gets complicated. His family is… a lot. Their home is huge and elegant, but also maze-like, miserable, and allergic to light. The nuptials’ guest list expands from less than a dozen to nearly a hundred — more if you count the uninvited attendees in addition to the unwanted ones.
The premise of a simple wedding gone horribly, horrifically wrong should sound familiar, but “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” never feels that way. For one, Haley Z. Boston’s new Netflix series is cloaked in sinister vibes. Dark, eerie, and paranoid (for good reason), the eight-episode season shifts back and forth from the casual grimness of an unwelcoming reality to the shocking frights of a stoner’s worst nightmare (the latter of which is shrewdly motivated by Rachel regularly smoking pot).
It’s a horror show and a marriage story in one, yet what heightens the series beyond a bloody good time is how it subverts expectations. The “Something” from its title shifts from episode to episode, even as the narrative unpacks all the reasons a happy couple might get cold feet. In the end, “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” isn’t about how the pressures associated with weddings can ruin a marriage before it starts. Instead, it’s about why marriages shouldn’t be entered into lightly, if at all.
Such pessimism may make “Something Very Bad” sound as fun as a wedding reception with a cash bar and a DJ playing polka music, when its vibe is actually much closer to your coolest friends’ big bash: no bullshit, bangers only.
It helps to have Morrone steering the ship. As Rachel, she exudes the too-cool-for-a-white-wedding attitude that roots her character as a reluctant aisle-walker. She’s got the visible tattoos, the smoking habit, and the uncouth humor (at a gas stop, she buys Nicky a bumper sticker that reads, “Never get down on one knee for a woman who won’t get down on two”) that mark Rachel as your atypical woman in white. But she never feels like she’s playing dress-up: not as a rebel, nor as a bride. She’s too perceptive, too curious, and too confident, for reasons that become clearer as the season goes along, but Morrone embodies, sans comment, from the start.
“Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” spends its opening episodes in similar fashion. (“OK, what’s really going on here?” became a recurring thought.) So few details are shared about the characters’ backgrounds, you’re actually more in the dark than Rachel herself, who’s meeting the Cunninghams for the first time. Surely, she asked about Nicky’s bossy younger sister, Portia (Gus Birney), an aggressively unfiltered motormouth; his older brother, Jules (Jeff Wilbusch), the black sheep of the family who wears his role with scornful pride; Jules’ wife, Nell (Karla Crome) and their son, Jude (Sawyer Fraser); and she must’ve unearthed a few details about Nicky’s parents, Boris (Ted Levine) and Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are treated as a paragon of marriage despite making a first impression that sends Rachel running for the hills (literally).
Squeamish viewers may be tempted to follow her. Despite being a supernatural horror show produced by the Duffer Brothers, “Something Very Bad” isn’t told in the cartoonish, CGI-heavy style of “Stranger Things.” Dead animals abound, people’s insides are ripped out, and at least one episode gives “The Boys” a run for its money in terms of blood spilled. It’s a horror show made for adults and that only adults, having experienced good and bad marriages first- or second-hand, will fully appreciate. In between gruesome sights, perpetual dread rules the day — as it should, given the title — via roving, hungry camerawork (by “Baby Reindeer’s” Krzysztof Trojnar), impeccable music cues (courtesy of composer Colin Stetson and music supervisor Tiffany Anders), and pitch-black shadows ready to send your imagination scurrying to all sorts of disturbing assumptions.
For those who can stomach it (and, mind you, horror enthusiasts will be feasting), “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” proves a rewarding, otherworldly treat. Sure, there are too many endings and not enough exposition (for once) when it comes to certain aspects that I’m embargoed from discussing. (Let’s just say Nathan Fielder should be pleased.) But you’ll be guessing the happy couple’s ultimate fate ’til the very end, morbid humor elicits outsized laughs simply by relieving our sustained apprehension, and each episode edging them closer to “I do” (or “I don’t”) is filled with smart twists, astute observations, and wicked embodiments of universal anxieties.
Everyone knows what marriage is supposed to be about: love. But anyone who’s lived long enough to see couples grow and wither also knows it takes more than strong feelings to sustain a relationship. We all bring our own baggage, and we all carry baggage from our families, friends, and lived experience. So many factors have to come together for things to work out, it’s easy to believe healthy matrimony is an impossible dream. “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” indulges in that disenchantment to a deranged degree, but it also twists it into something romantic: respect.
If you’re going to commit yourself to another person “until death do us part,” you damn sure better recognize it’s a big deal.
Grade: B+
“Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” premieres Thursday, March 26 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released at once.
