The official synopsis for Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, Netflix’s dour new eight-part horror series, loftily invokes two decades-old classics. Where Carrie (1976) was “horror’s version of a girl becoming a woman”, and Rosemary’s Baby (1967) was the “horrific version of a woman becoming a mother”, this new series is, we are told, “horror’s take on a woman becoming a wife”. Here, wedding jitters are imbued with the occult; the worry isn’t so much cold feet but severed ones.
The bride-to-be in question is Rachel (Camila Morrone), a twitchy enigma with a slight deer-in-headlights quality, who travels out to the country to stay with her fiancee’s family in the days before their wedding. Said fiancee, Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco), is blandly nice, while his family are different shades of creepy. The only memorable one of the bunch is Jennifer Jason Leigh (a top actor in her day, here operating more or less in third gear). One of his siblings, played by Gus Birney, is ditzy and femme in a way that uncannily invokes Meredith Hagner’s character in Search Party. (She even shares that character’s name, Portia.)
Despite spreading its story over eight long episodes, Something Very Bad spends almost no time establishing a status quo to upend: things are stifling and fraught from the off in the Cunningham home. Dingy and large, it seems like a relic from another century, while Morrone breezes in looking like Dua Lipa.
To her credit, creator Haley Z Boston swerves the obvious metaphor – marriage as a satanic trap, already explored to bombastic extremes in the 2019 murderous-in-laws horror Ready or Not – and lands on something a little slipperier. Rachel is not without her own secrets, though the more you learn about her backstory, the more daft and implausible it seems. There are interesting critiques on marriage in here, but seldom rendered cleanly. And, perhaps most damning: it just isn’t scary. The most effective jump scares are often the title cards, which loudly flash onto the screen in a move ripped from Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
The biggest problems with Something Very Bad, though, are recurrent failings of Netflix’s output. (It’s noteworthy, perhaps, that the series is executive produced by the Duffer brothers, Netflix royalty thanks to Stranger Things.) It’s hard to shake the feeling that this would have worked better as a feature film: the pacing drags, and some of the tortuous plotting feels as if it is simply stalling for time. More annoying still is the series’ aesthetic, which is frequently so dark and colour-washed that it’s hard to tell what you’re even looking at.
It’s a tedious axiom at this point to complain about Netflix’s allergy to good lighting set-ups. The issue pervades nearly all of its shows, most of its original films, and has been remarked upon endlessly by viewers and critics alike. To mention it is to point out that water is wet, or that the sky is blue. (Except, of course, if it’s shown on Netflix, in which case the sky is in all likelihood more of a murky blueish grey.) But the drab and colourless look of Something Very Bad undermines everything else about it, neutering horror and drama alike.
Ultimately, this is a series undone by a technical failing, one that at this point is too endemic to be mistaken for an accident. Here comes the bride? Maybe, if you squint – I’ll have to take your word for it.
