Something Very Bad Takes Way Too Long to Happen

Judy BermanThu, March 26, 2026 at 7:01 AM UTC

0

Netflix allows users to change the playback speed of its videos. I hate this feature. Timing, pace, and duration are crucial parts of audiovisual storytelling; sure, you can watch Gilmore Girls at half speed, but you’ll miss the rapid-fire dialogue that gives the show its bounce. Yet as I was watching Netflix's new horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, I had to fight the urge to toggle up the speed to 1.5x. By the third aimless episode, I felt more dread about having five more installments to go than I did about anything that was happening to the characters.

Created by Haley Z. Boston (and, flaws aside, a big improvement on her broad Netflix horror noir Brand New Cherry Flavor), Something is notable for being executive producers the Duffer brothers’ first new series in the decade since Stranger Things debuted. But don’t be fooled by their involvement; this is not a family show. It is, rather, a show about family—and specifically marriage. What makes two people soulmates, if such a phenomenon even exists? How do parents or siblings or household lore about love influence our romantic relationships? How can you really know, by the time you exchange vows, that you’ve found your person? These could have been rich ideas to explore through horror, if only the show didn’t take so long to raise the questions and then hide its lack of insightful answers behind a dozen mostly predictable twists.An eerie wedding opens the premiere. As a beautiful, palpably anxious bride, Camila Morrone’s Rachel, walks down the aisle to her adoring groom, Nicky (Adam DiMarco), the sound of labored breathing nearly drowns out the music. There are point-of-view shots filtered through the gauze of Rachel’s veil. A montage of the couple’s past flashes by. We note the slightest hint of hesitation. Ominous vibes aside, it’s all pretty typical wedding stuff. Cut to a wolflike creature stalking darkened hallways, empty except for a wide stream of blood, to a chorus of screams.

Camila Morrone and Adam DiMarco in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen —Netflix

This is a flash-forward. The story unfolds in the five days leading up to it; when you title your show Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen (which, when you think about, could be the name of just about any story), there’s no need to pretend that everything’s going to go off without a hitch. Rachel and Nicky are driving to his family’s rural vacation home, where they are planning to have a very low-key winter wedding. In an echo of DiMarco’s White Lotus character, he’s the sweet, coddled baby boy of the kind of rich clan who call their lush woodland compounds cabins. She is the opposite—a young woman with no family support and little backstory. Shrewd, guarded, and a smidge gothy, Rachel is our audience surrogate and Morrone’s self-possessed performance the show’s greatest asset. For her, the bad juju begins on the road, and not just because Nicky is trying to persuade her that they should have kids. (“I don’t wanna be torn open,” she protests.) A gory rest-stop bathroom tableau and a cavernous, David-Lynch-lite roadhouse raise the possibility that she’s seeing things that aren’t really there.

Advertisement

Nicky’s family is weird, too. Matriarch Victoria (a thrillingly creepy Jennifer Jason Leigh) doesn’t seem to be all there, saving her moments of coherence for morbid speeches about love. “Time is an unstoppable force, and it will do whatever it can to destroy you. And ultimately it will win,” she reminds her kids and their partners. “Marriage is a powerful merging of souls. It’s like being sewn together.” When he isn’t holed up doing taxidermy, her protective physician husband (Ted Levine) stalks around the cabin angrily. Their older son, Jules (Jeff Wilbusch), has struggled to recover from a traumatic childhood experience in the woods outside the cabin but is now married to a patient ex-girlfriend of Nicky’s, Nell (Karla Crome), and father to a curious boy, Jude (Sawyer Fraser). Nick and Jules’ sister Portia is a real trip, an alternately flighty and haughty mean girl played to devilishly effervescent perfection by Dickinson scene stealer Gus Birney.

From left: Karla Crome, Jeff Wilbusch, Gus Birney, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ted Levine, Adam DiMarco, and Camila Morrone in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen —Netflix

It’s a promising cast of characters, one that riffs on stock horror types without repeating them and, in its portrait of a rich family, avoids defaulting to scary Succession. (Netflix has already done that, well, with Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher.) With eight episodes’ worth of time to fill, Boston could have really dug into the relationships between fiancés and spouses, parents and children, sisters and brothers, idealized romance and the reality of spending most of your life with a person. None of this would’ve necessarily contradicted the conventions of the genre. Instead, she gives us what might have been enough character development for a feature film and spends the bulk of the season—and especially those first three prefatory episodes—loading up on generically spooky atmospherics: jump scares, darkened corners, found-footage framing, heavy breathing and other unnerving sounds, sudden spurts of blood and abrupt bursts of violence. There’s even some textbook kiddie nightmare fuel, in the form of a local frozen custard (not ice cream!) business founded by a psycho killer, whose logo is a swirl of white soft serve dipped in something revoltingly red. It’s a stylish yawn.

The back half of the season is better overall. The ending isn’t revelatory, in the sense that it doesn’t quite complete Something’s thoughts on matrimony or family or inherited attitudes toward either, but it’s clever and kind of exhilarating. Characters like Nell and Jules gain some depth. There are a few well-executed twists among the many that are easy to anticipate. But those developments create new problems, pulling our attention away from any mysteries we’ve managed to become invested in and discarding them as empty misdirection. There are still episodes, too, like one set at Rachel and Nicky’s rehearsal dinner, whose substance could’ve been covered in a scene. A fine line separates suspense from boredom. Draw out a plot beat for too long or keep repeating an effect that was scary the first time, and you’re bound to cross it.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”