'Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen' Review: Creepy Netflix Horror
Camila Morrone in 'Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.'
Courtesy of Netflix
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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.
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Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
The Bottom Line
A clever spin on prenuptial jitters.
Airdate: Thursday, March 26 (Netflix)
Cast: Camila Morrone, Adam DiMarco, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jeff Wilbusch, Karla Crome, Ted Levine, Gus Birney, Sawyer Fraser, Josh Hamilton, Victoria Pedretti, Zlatko Buric
Creator: Haley Z. Boston
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 Rac