It’s been a fun three episodes, but the minds behind new Netflix frightener, Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, have obviously decided that it’s time for some long overdue payoff. Placing info dumps in the middle of a show in full swing can go a number of different ways, but the most likely results are that you manage to enhance the perceived threat by finally giving it form, or you instantly torpedo everything you’ve built up until this moment because it simply can’t match the unknown horrors you’ve be alluding at.
Usually, the best way to proceed is to come up with an explanation that itself spawns yet more questions, and thus changes the flow of the story into something fresh and new without losing that edge that kept you coming back in the first place.
Does the fourth episode of Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen manages to pull it off? Bear witness…
When we last left the tension broiling withing the Cunningham’s summer home, Rachel had managed to actually get the uptight family talking about their personal issues regarding the upcoming death of mother, Victoria. However, while even the deadpan Nell had to admit she was impressed with her future sister-in-law’s tenacity, the rules of the game changed once more when a heavy breathing intruder attacked the bride-to-be, smothering her with chloroform. As the attackers speeds away, young Jude shows Jules camcorder footage he caught of the man and asks his father if it’s The Sorry Man, a serial killer of local legend who Jules allegedly witnessed as a child.
However, while Jules is having childhood wounds ripped open, we’re long past due for some explanations as to what the Hell is actually going on. Well, for starters, the intruder turns out to be Rachel’s estranged father, Jay Harlon, who shows his furious daughter footage from his own wedding day to her pregnant mother, Alexandra. In the video, we see that she’s suffering the anxiety that her daughter has been going through, but both she and Jay go through with their small wedding despite that she looks visibly uneasy. However, after the wedding, Alexandra starts bleeding profusely from her eyes nose and mouth and as she succumbs to massive blood loss, a panicking Jay cuts the still-living baby Rachel from her womb.
It’s here that things start getting really weird. It turns out that this is the exact thing that Jules saw as a child that’s traumatised him for years as he was hiding under the bed of the lodge at the time after running away from home. Continuing his run of phenomenal timing, adult Jules bursts in with a rifle, thinking that he’s going to end the threat of the Sorry Man once and for all.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there – recognising a familiar voice from the witness at her parent’s wedding, Rachel flees the scene and goes back to the creepy bar where she had that run in with the old stranger. It turns out that despite not having aged a day, the old man was the witness to that fateful wedding back in 1997, and he knows exactly what’s going on…
While there’s no doubt going to be a bunch of people who will be annoyed that SVBIGTH (can’t type the full title any more, sorry) has finally given a large chunk of the game away at the halfway mark, I have to say thatvwhat the show has come up with is intriguing enough to be worth it. To be fair, I think is actually quite well timed as I’m not actually sure how many episodes the makers could have stretched the creepy family trope for before things managed to get quite samey and repetitive. As a result, not only does it blow the story wide open in a way that connects a whole bunch of dots and details, but it gets those ever-shifting brands of horror back in the spotlight.
Taking it’s cue from the first person footage that closed out her last episode, Axelle Carolyn spends a good portion of this once relying mostly on grainy, jumpy, glitchy camcorder footage to lay out vast amounts of desperately needed back story that pretty much explains (or at least recalls) a lot of the weirdness that occurred back in episode one. As we follow Rachel’s parents make the same similar journey to marriage as she is destined to one day make, they stop for a strange interlude with the creepy owner of the Coldies Frozen Custard stand that Nicky brought up in the first episode. As we go from the drive, to the wedding itself, we eventually get the show’s first, real case of bloodshed when Alexandra (played in a smart bit of casting by Neflix horror miniseries veteran, Victoria Pedretti) suddenly loses the majority of her blood through her various face holes. This ends up being first major nexus point of the episode as it not only shows us how Rachel’s mother died, but it also gives us the origins of Jules’ personal boogeyman as a terrified, apologetic Jay cuts baby Rachel from her dead mother, thus creating the Sorry Man legend that’s plagued the eldest Cunningham child ever since.
However, when it comes to outlandish situations that accounts for all that strange shit, the best is yet to come. Inexplicably recognising the old man she stabbed with her key back at the bar as the witness at their wedding from his question, “Are you sure he’s the one?”, Rachel confronts him once more and gets more answers than she bargained for. It seems that the Witness knows everything, because he’s technically the source of it all. Thanks to a deal made by an ancestor with death itself to save a dying loved one, the entity required payment that stretched the breadth of his blood line and required him to marry their soulmate or die. Unsure if he made the right choice, the Witness jilted his bride at the altar which led to two, rather outlandish, results – firstly, the curse moved from the Witness to his bride, meaning that she had to find a soulmate or die, and the second is that the Witness himself has now become immortal and is destined to bear witness to every other person connected to that bloodline as they go through the same ordeal. Obviously, the next love the Witness’ beloved had was a descendant of Rachel’s which explains everything away. The overwhelming anxiety she feels is because she’s literally being followed by death as it waits for her wedding day and if this curse proves to be true, it puts her in something of an awkward position. If she marries Nicky and it turns out that they aren’t soulmates, the same, blood gurgling fate that killed her mother awaits her. However, if she jilts him, the curse shifts to the Cunninghams who mostly are all locked in unhappy marriages already and she may be doomed to immortality just like the Witness. And you thought sorting out the seating arrangements was the most stressful part of a wedding.
Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen pulls back a large portion of it’s curtain and fearlessly ploughs into greatly expanding it’s lore. However, while the premise of immortal men, malevolent curses and the concept of death as an entity who’s quite happy to do deals seems like it could capsize the boat, director Carolyn funnels the weirdness from episode one in to up the stakes in wonderfully fucked- up ways. All it has to do now, is capitalize.
Can I get a witness?
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