As anyone even remotely interested in the horror genre will tell you, foreshadowing is absurdly important. An ominous POV, a change in music, or even some unseen evidence that something untoward has, or will, or might happen is absolutely vital when it comes to ratcheting up that tension even before the scary shit starts. It’s fairly amusing then, that Netflix’s new scare show delivers a healthy amount of foreshadowing with its title alone, but I guess you can afford to be cocky with a title like Something Very Bad Is About To Happen when you have a production team as loaded at this.
Fresh from rounding off the gargantuan pop culture phenomenon, Stranger Things, are none other than the Duffer Brothers who are pulling executive producer duties and in the role of crrator and showrunner is the one of the writers behind the appropriately freaky Brand New Cherry Flavour and an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities. However, possibly most exciting of all is the fact that four of the eight episodes are being helmed by Weronika Tofilska, the director of a good chunk of the hit show Baby Reindeer. With such a line up, surely we’ll get something that worthy of such an amusingly boastful title.
We seemingly begin at a wedding that sees bride to be, Rachel, looking far from pleased as she walks down the aisle in her wedding dress. But as we flash past remembered fragments of the recent past (none of them particularly reassuring), we suddenly bounce back five days earlier before Rachel is to deliver her uncertain “I do”. We meet Rachel formally as she and her husband to be, Nicky, are driving to his family’s remote cabin in the woods where the wedding is due to be held, but before we even arrive, the journey seems to be riddled with strange occurrences.
Starting with listening to a podcast concerning a survivor of a serial killer attack who managed to live after the throat was slashed, things continue to be vaguely surreal after they overhear a conversation at a diner concerning someone whose dogs keep vanishing without trace. This, however, is only the baseline of weird and much later into the evening, they pull up at a deserted truck stop to kind a seemingly abandoned vehicle in the snow containing a baby. While Nicky stays behind to keep watch, Rachel drives until she finds a decapitated bar to call the police, but after yet more, ever more surreal happenings (this time involving an old man who cryptically asks “Are you sure he’s the one?”), she heads back to discover that the baby’s parents had returned but had punched Nicky in the face after a misunderstanding.
Finally, we reach the family cabin of Nicky’s folks, but if we were under the apprehension that the sense of underlying dread would dissipate once they arrived, there’s no such luck. Nicky’s siblings Portia, Jules and his wife, Nell, hardly deliver a warm welcome, with the excitable Portia telling Rachel of a creepy family legend known as the Sorry Man.
With Rachel’s uneasiness reaching an all time high, the final kicker is an awkward meeting with Nicky’s parents and a wedding invite with the words “Don’t Marry Him” written on the back. Talk about your bad first impressions…
As we all know, weddings are pretty damn stressful as it is, but in the hands of the creative forces molding the show, Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen takes this premise and sprints headlong into Lynchian dream logic territory. Obviously, this means that episode one is chock full of willfully confounding oddness with no hint of a payoff as we get a string of creepy happenstances that no doubt will mean more the further into the season we go.
A big risk is that during these early days, we’re essentially asked to go a lot on faith as we have no idea what the “very bad thing” in the title could possibly be. After all, we live in frustrating times where viewers demand instant gratification, when a good, old fashioned slow burn can do you a world of good, even if it’s required to go on for eight whole episodes. Whether Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen can sustain it for the duration is something we’ll eventually find out for ourselves, but episode one proves to be a damn good start.
Camila Morrone makes a rather compelling lead as she bounces between legitimate, creepy experiences (deserted public toilets, odd old men) and socially awkward situations (meeting the in-laws), but while she’s obviously the epicenter of whatever’s going to occur, there’s something also strange with her. Obviously she seems to be battling perpetual anxiety via smoking weed and a strange ritual she has involving a trunk, but as the episode progresses she’s also constantly buffeted by unnerving waves of deja vu. We get this thanks to the various Lynchian details that call back to seemingly insignificant things that could mean everything, or nothing. The conversation about missing dogs is echoed with various spots of imagery of dead canines and a detail in that grisly true crime podcast considering a would-be victim discovering a random Barbie doll shoe in the killer’s car is mirrored when Rachel finds the same thing in an abandoned bathroom.
Of course, part of the fun of stuff like this is that it could all be red herrings. The abandoned baby could ultimately have nothing to do with anything, but chances are, the creepy old dude (played by the ubiquitous Zlatko Burić) will have a part to play, especially after a rather jarring moment where Rachel inadvertently stabs him through the palm with her keys and he doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest.
However, once we get to meet Nicky’s family, it’s obvious that dealing with with mounting anxiety is what the show is really about (how many of us have unconciously slipped our keys between our fingers as a makeshift weapon in out pocket when we’re scared), and our imaginations certainly run riot once Rachel gets a very strange reception from all of her in-laws. We’ll doubtlessly deal with them in more detail as the season goes on, but Portia’s tale of the Sorry Man is quite the story to tell to a total stranger five days before she marries into the family. Essentially a urban legend about an otherworldly being who weeps apologies as he rips open women in the hope of finding his lost wife inside, this could also be a mood building red herring, or it could be a major plot point – but Tofilska us smart enough to know that not knowing anything us all part of the fun in these early days.
Murky, creepy and laced with nightmare logic, the first episode of Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen proves to be immensely promising, especially when it comes to mining anxiety inducing imagery and scenarios. In fact, I’m immensely interested to see how the show funnels some traditional horror iconography (remote cabins, oppressive architecture, oddball families) into a fairly fresh way. Whether it can keep it up is another matter entirely, but as of right now, Something Very Cool Is Currently Occurring.
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