Summary
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen lives up to the promise of its title, but it’s also a little too weird, esoteric, and scattershot in its approach to horror, ending up too disjointed to feel tethered to any recognisable reality.
With all the cache that the Duffer brothers have built up after the success of Stranger Things – a somewhat controversial ending notwithstanding – you kind of have to pay attention to whatever they’re doing. Luckily, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is worth paying attention to. It’s a work of surprisingly daring craft that I have lots of thoughts on, albeit very few I can share here for fear of spoilers. This is, after all, one of those shows, one built on a series of escalating and completely redefining twists and turns that periodically pivot everything into new genres, tones, and moods. I still have no idea whether or not I actually like it.
The promises of its title are kept, at the very least. Bad things do indeed happen at quite a regular clip. But trying to summarise it with a simple label like “horror” is a waste of time. It has horror elements, obviously, cribbing from all kinds of classic staples, haunted house framing and slasher staging and demonic flourishes, none of which are committed to for the long term. Eight episodes isn’t too many on principle, but it is too many in practice, because there’s too much room for the Duffers to indulge in too many ideas.
It’s a weird show, in other words, and I’d argue it’s a bit too weird. Things get outlandish and eerie so quickly that it makes considerably less than no sense for any of the characters to stick around. Their determination to do so isn’t just a riff on the genre trope of going into that dark basement or trusting that strange man who’s obviously a serial killer; it’s more of a complete untethering from any recognisable reality, making it difficult to buy into the very human plight that emerges at its core.
And there is a human core here. Ostensibly, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is about Rachel (Camila Morrone, The Night Manager) and Nicky (Adam DiMarco, The White Lotus), a young couple who are on the cusp of getting married at a small, intimate ceremony at Nicky’s rural family home. But the journey to get there is dotted with utterly bonkers events at a rest stop, the family home turns out to be a bizarre, curving warren of secrets with demented accoutrements like stuffed Irish wolfhounds and a family portrait with a painted-over ex-wife, and the family all act like dysfunctional lunatics in a way that only Rachel seems to notice.
In brief: Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ted Levine (Mayfair Witches) play the parents of Nicky, his sister Portia (Gus Birney, The Last Frontier), and his brother Julian (Jeff Wilbusch, Unorthodox). Julian is unhappily married to Nellie (Karla Crome, Lazarus, Toxic Town), and together they have a creepy son, Jude (Sawyer Fraser), so all the requisite pieces are in place. About five minutes after arriving, Rachel is regaled with the story of the “Sorry Man”, a demonic serial killer who stalks the woods and turns women inside-out, believing his long-lost wife is hiding inside them.
It’s so much weirdness in such a short span of time that none of it really rings true. The Sorry Man seems like he’s going to be the Big Bad of the piece, but he’s merely a small factor in a story that keeps reshaping itself on the fly, so when things eventually cohere into something resembling a typical narrative structure, we’re expected to accept a version of each character that doesn’t match up with the portrayals we saw earlier. The Duffers want to cycle through as many horror staples as possible – there’s one episode filmed almost entirely in a found-footage style, for instance – almost at random, and the ultimate effect is of something more like an anthology than a coherent story.
Our anchor is Rachel, and to be fair, Camila Morrone’s performance in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is undeniable. She’s expected to operate in a considerable range of emotions and states – terrified, confused, angry, emotionally traumatised, drunk, funny, disbelieving – and is often asked to cycle through several in a single scene. There’s even a moment approaching the midpoint where the Duffers interestingly transfer a lot of agency to her, reframing her dynamic with Nicky’s family in a way that requires almost a completely new approach to her interactions with them. There are plenty of reasons to watch this – a lot of it works like gangbusters, even if it doesn’t always make much sense – but Marrone is the biggest, least controversial one.
Ultimately, as much of a cop-out as it sounds, mileage may vary. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, and several quite daring creative choices that put a lot of trust on the shoulders of a relatively inexperienced actor (not least of which being several extreme close-ups held for an uncomfortable length of time). But it’s hard to say that everything on offer necessarily comes together in a holistic way. With everything thrown at the wall, sure, plenty of it sticks, but a lot also slides messily to the floor with a disappointing splat. Still, this is big, bold filmmaking worth a look on that basis alone. I just wish someone would turn the damn lights on.
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