‘Something Very Bad Is Gonna Happen’ review: Camila Morrone and Adam DeMarco in Netflix’s creepy, sexy romantic horror show

To hear love songs tell it, finding a soulmate should be a warm, fuzzy, and joyful experience. “How wonderful life is when you’re in the world,” Elton John sings. “You are simply the best,” exclaimed Tina Turner. “When you know, you know,” Taylor Swift sighs.

But try saying that to a nervous bride in the days leading up to her wedding, as she’s thinking about how much of her future she’s betting on her fiancé really being the one. Netflix Something very bad will happenfrom creator Haley Z. Boston (Brand new cherry flavour(Executive producers Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer)Strange things), takes those pre-wedding tensions and amplifies them to supernatural extremes, ultimately concluding into a surprisingly thoughtful and satisfyingly bloody look at the impossibility of absolute romantic certainty.

From all outward appearances, Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DeMarco) look like a promising match. She’s the patient, a ball of anxiety wrapped in black T-shirts and surrounded by puffs of marijuana smoke all around. He is the obvious optimist, always ready with a reassuring answer or lighthearted talk. Despite their opposing personalities, they clearly relate to each other’s needs, desires, and sense of humor. When they’re together, even a stop on a road trip for gas and coffee can seem like an impromptu date, full of dirty jokes about oral sex and playful musings about the children they might hope to have one day.

However, Rachel senses that something is wrong. As the couple approaches the Cunningham family’s grand countryside vacation home, where they plan to hold their wedding in five days, bad omens seem to abound: they hear snippets of a disturbing conversation, a dead fox on the side of the road, a passing car with “Just Married” written in blood.

Then, once they actually arrive at Somerhouse, the bad omens turn into bad signs — including a literal card-shaped sign addressed to Rachel that says: “Don’t marry him.” Nikki’s family, led by his self-absorbed mother Victoria (a grossly underutilized Jennifer Jason Leigh), alternate between a distance toward Rachel that borders on contempt and an excitement about the wedding that verges on interference. There are stories of a knife-wielding, bride-killing monster lurking in the woods, which Nicky’s older brother (Jeff Wilbush’s icy Jules) may or may not have encountered when he was a child. Even given Rachel’s self-confessed tendency toward paranoia, it seems clear that there’s more going on than just pre-wedding awkwardness.

Boston and director Weronika Tovelska (who helmed the first episode, among others) strike the gruesome tones of familiar marital tropes with a sly, twisted sense of humor. Dress adjustments are made in a flurry of violent tears and sharp cuts. From some angles the custom-built rice altar looks like something out of a fairy tale, and from others (much to the chagrin of Nicky’s snobbish little sister Portia, played by Gus Burney) like something out of… The Blair Witch Project. When magnified enough, the click of a wedding photographer’s camera can sound like a gun being loaded.

Very bad thing The aura of dread is cultivated less by gory graphics than by surprise and suggestion, from the sudden cuts that confound our sense of time, to the soundtrack filled with songs that seem almost to haunt us in their love (Paul Anka’s “You Are My Destiny” is a recurring title track), to the shaky camera angles that make us unwitting co-conspirators with someone or something unseen. But when the plot turns into something more sinister and then delves into the supernatural, it’s not necessarily shy about showing us something very bad: a skinned animal, a severed body part, or streams of blood.

Morrone proves herself to be a skilled horror heroine, keeping Rachel grounded in an endearing and earthy relationship even as her mental state escalates in direct proportion to the horror escalating around her. Opposite her, DiMarco plays Nicky as a variation on his signature role White lotus -He’s undeniably cute but he’s also probably very keen to be seen as undeniably cute. It’s to the performers’ credit that we find it almost as difficult as Rachel does to figure out whether they’re really in love and just being cold under these horrific circumstances, or whether they’re not, and she’s just trying to convince herself they are because her life depends on it.

However, around them, the group has more difficulty concentrating. Burney makes an immediate impression as the spoiled princess Portia, but after that she’s not offered anything to do other than provide semi-comedian semblance; Likewise, Leigh has quite the entrance as an almost ghostly figure wandering the halls, but then she’s so weakly drawn that dialogue is required to make clear that we’re meant to find her deeply narcissistic. On the other hand, characters like Jules, his wife Nell (Karla Crum) and Nicky’s father (Ted Levine). He does They become more interesting as we learn more about them, but then we’re not given enough screen time to go beyond just the frustration of Rachel and Nikki’s story.

The thinness of the characters is particularly odd considering this Very bad thing She has, if anything, too much time on her hands. In its plot and structure, this often feels less like a series than a two-hour movie that was stretched out to fill eight 45-minute episodes on the rationale that the latter would be easier to get greenlit than the former. But the extra minutes go more toward padding the plot with unnecessary diversions (such as a metaphor-laden fishing trip) or extending necessary excursions (such as a library hunt) to two or three times their obvious length.

However, I can’t say I’ve ever been bored. The series excels at casting a spell through bizarre details, nasty red flags, and disturbing clues. And underlying it all lies an unexpectedly honest exploration of what true love can or should feel, sitting on the knife’s edge between sentimentality and cynicism. Rachel has more reason than most to agonize over the question of how to recognize a soulmate – whether it is a matter of fate or simply making a decision, a decision based on pure feelings or vague, objective calculations. But the series works because these inquiries aren’t trivial for the rest of us, either. “Till death do us part” is a romantic affirmation. And he too, Very bad thing They’ll notice, with an arched brow, that there’s something threatening about it — a reminder that, even in the best-case scenario, it’s all bound to end in pools of blood and tears.