So the latest Netflix miniseries to try to scare us all is Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, which should be required viewing for all young couples contemplating marriage—maybe the way that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace should be required reading for all wannabe dictators eager to stumble into an unwinnable war.
The plot, as it were, is a bit clunky: Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky (Adam DiMarco) are a cutesy couple about to get married, an opposites-attract kind of story, from a socioeconomic angle: Nicky is a rich kid with a mysterious family and Rachel is a survivor of sorts from an unstable family, a touchy gal (think psychic powers, maybe) whose mother died in childbirth, seemingly from a supernatural incident. (Or it could be bad custard.) There’s a pockmarked-face old guy who asks Rachel, “Are you sure he’s the one?”—referring to Nicky, her groom-to-be—who seems straight out of David Lynch’s quirky, surreal 1990s series Twin Peaks. (He also stabs her in the leg with a fork.) The Richie-Riches are eager to get the wedding planned and pulled off, in a few days time. Viewers will no doubt get some Get Out (2017) vibes. The family seems to have a fate in mind for Rachel, which will be “very bad.”
My favorite character is Portia (played by Gus Birney), Nicky’s pampered sister who seems to drink an inordinate amount of coffee. She rushes around planning the wedding, being mean and catty as if that’s her natural state of being. At times the series feels like a stretched-out version of Knives Out (2019) or Ready or Not (2019): Young woman gets bad vibes as she’s about to marry into a family of rich weirdoes, who may or may not be planning to sacrifice her at some altar of devil’s cult or perhaps for a kind of DIY immortality. Plus Camila Morrone once dated Leo DiCaprio, just sayin’.
There’s much spookiness: One of the rich brothers has a childhood memory scar from a boogeyman called The Sorry Man, which I can’t help but think would be said by a remorseful Dude from The Big Lebowski, who would plead, “I’m sorry, man,” after dropping a lit roach into your seat cushions and leaving a burn hole. But I’m a sucker for mildly entertaining Netflix mumbo-jumbo. Plus it stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as a spooky dying mother. She looks like a zombie and acts like one too. Which is a waste of talent, as Jennifer Jason Leigh is a force of nature. If you want to see her in a really wild role check out Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015), where she plays dynamic gang-leader Daisy Domergue.
