Now we know that Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen has been created in order to be a procession of socially terrifying happenstances that’s designed to make you either squirm in discomfort or spiral down a paranoid rabbit hole, episode 2 dispenses with a lot of the seemingly random imagery and locks things down within the weirdly oppressive home of the Cunningham’s summer home. Creator Haley Z. Boston obviously has had some jitters somewhere down the line with meeting the family of a loved one, so what we get us a merciless, near hour-long episode that’ll be a damn eternity for anyone suffering from extreme social awkwardness.
While we only got to meet them sparingly throughout the previous episode, it’s time for us – and Rachel – to properly meet the family she’s about to marry into; but the Cunninghams prove to be just as emotionally elusive in person as they are at a fleeting glance. But surely there’s a reasonable explanation for this, right?
With her anxiety already tipping into the red due to the note she found urging her not to marry Nicky, Rachel finds that ball of panic lodged in her chest only getting bigger once she finds that her wedding dress is missing. Despite being 99% sure they packed it back up after showing it to friends back in Cleaveland, the vital item of clothing is nowhere to be found and that sense of choking dread that telling Rachel that something is terribly wrong only gets worse once the Cunninghams try to help.
For a start, they seem to already have their own ideas about how everything should look and immediately waste no time sticking her in the dress of matriarch, Victoria, while cutting it to fit and mostly disregarding a thing Rachel has to say. But as uncomfortable as this all is, Rachel keeps catching snatches of hushed conversations that seem to hint that some sort of nefarious plan is transpiring that’s made all the worse by Nicky not being there to buffer the weirdness as he’s headed back to Cleaveland to get the dress. With Victoria, Portia and Nell seemingly disinterested in her own wants or needs, soon the weirdness gets too much and Rachel goes exploring to find that dress, but the more she looks, the creepier things get. In the room of sneering brother-in-law Jules, she finds an injection of pentobarbital sodium in his wardrobe, patriarch Boris has a very over emotional response to seeing Rachel in his wife’s wedding dress, there seems to be a book about supernatural practices in Portia’s bedroom and various other things that drive hrmer to the very edge of paranoia.
When dinner comes, Rachel takes the initiative and sneaks outside to explore the snowy grounds in order to find out where that sound of the puttering generator has been coming from all day. But what she finds is enough to finally freak her out good and proper – however, with the return of Nicky, can there be an explanation for all of this that actually makes sense?
If Weronika Tofilska’s first episode was an excuse to indulge in her inner David Lynch and really flex those haunting, dream logic muscles, the more ensemble based “Bride-Shaped Hole” allows her to veer more into Roman Polanski, Rosemary’s Baby territory as those themes of paranoia and anxiety full take hold. Switching out the creepy, road movie stylings in favour of an episode that almost entirely takes place inside the strangely maze-like Cunningham summer home, it’s an opportunity to really get to know the in-laws after a rather strange first impression. We’ve all had to meet in-laws before and it’s admittedly something that can strip the nerves down to the bone at the best of times, but with a title like Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, it’s no surprise that this is taken to toe curling limits.
Attacking the weird, triggering paranoia that comes from trying to bond with an emotionally complex family unit with the same amount of vigour it reserved for unsettling truck stops, we’re right along side Rachel as her mind starts compiling panicked conspiracy theories concerning her new family. Both Tofilska and Boston seem to be taking an incredible amount of perverse pleasure by putting both their lead character and their audience through the social anxiety wringer by beating us about the head and neck with all sorts of red flags and mental alarm bells and they do so with the aid of a cast more than willing to mercilessly put you on edge. With Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Victoria kicking things off with an embarrassing breakfast speech that goes all out with laying on her love for Nicky thicker than whale blubber, Rachel is set upon by her, Gus Birney’s intense Portia and Karla Crome’s cynical Nell. After her dress has mysteriously (and suspiciously) “vanished”, the women of the Cunningham family prcoeed to dismantle every single orginal plan Rachel had for her wedding in favour of molding it into their own image. Things that mean the world to her are thrown on the figurative trash heap as she is given no choice about the matter at all.
Worse yet, Rachel’s already twitchy anxiety is given another strong tweak by the barely concealed whipering that’s going on being her back that suggest some secret master plan is in full swing. The whole thing is genuinely tough to sit through, especially for the more suggestible in nature as it’s super painfully to see Rachel have to weather this expectation while buffer Nicky is on his way to Cleaveland. Further more, the episode continues to deliver an overabundance of evidence to support that something very bad is going to happen sooner as you expected as books on witchcraft, lethal injections, a disgruntled older brother (Jeff Wilbusch in top dismissive form) and a potentially hostile father in the form of an over emotional Ted Levine sets the scene to veer into cult territory.
However, while the episode does some magnificent work at making your skin crawl with second-hand embarrassment while having you be utterly convinced that Rachel could be sacrificed (surely sight of her missing wedding dress drapped over a wooden effigy proves it), the most impressive thing the episode pulls off is how well it pulls you right back from the brink.
As the Cunninghams throw their hands up and admit some untoward shit is going on, the excuse that they’re hijacking the wedding comes from the fact that Victoria is dying and they figured that to merge the wedding with a farewell party after she takes her own life (hello, pentobarbital sodium) to give her one last hoorah. Stunningly, it all adds up – even her wedding dress showing up on a creepy wooden doll is reasonably explained away by Jules and Nell’s son trying to ward away the bride eating urban legend known as the Sorry Man.
For a show to get us this on edge means there’s talent involved, but to have us genuinely feel that we’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick when the show is screaming at us that something awful is guaranteed to happen is a sign that we really could be watching something special. Will the next episode once again shift the anxiety to something else entirely after hitting us with nightmare logic with one episode and then a creepy conspiracy with the next? Here’s hoping the show can continue to keep what could get quite convoluted as fresh as it can be.
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