We’re creeping alarmingly close to the grand finale of Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen now, but despite the fact that we’re already on the day of the hen party, it seems the show needs to dot some i’s and line some t’s. It’s round about here, in the final third of a season, that Netflix seems to always struggle with their shows – some previous examples have seen some noticeable stretching of material in order to fit an episode count that’s far too long for the story, while others realise they’ve run out of room and rush to the end. It’s a complaint I’ve had for a long time now and I apologise if you’ve heard me sing this particular song too many times before – but if SVBIGTH is going to stumble, it’s going to be here.
That’s right, we’ve reached a section of the season that riffs on the part of every horror film that usually occurs before the plunge into a potential bloody climax – the bit where the plucky heroine pulls out some detective skills to confirm all the horrible things that are happening to her. But with the show on something of a five episode roll, can Last Night Of Freedom keep that momentum going into the final bend?
Rachel is now starting to spiral. After discovering that the cherished story of how she and Nicky met has been revealed as something far less fateful (cheers, Jules), her confidence in Nicky being her soulmate has been dealt a devestating blow. While this shouldn’t be too much of an issue for your average bride to get over, it could be disastrous for Rachel thanks to the death curse that afflicts her bloodline – marry someone who isn’t your soulmate, and you’ll be fatally hemorrhaging before the day is out. Waking the morning after the excruciating rehearsal dinner, Nicky hopes to patch things up with his bride-to-be, but with less than 24 hours left before the big day, he finds Rachel’s bed is empty.
Determined to discover more about this curse and how exactly it’s affected her bloodline, Rachel has dragged Nell along to the County Clerk’s office and broken in (it’s a Saturday) in order to rifle through their records to weed out any birth, wedding and death certificates to make up a grisly family tree. As they piece together a comprehensive look at the mortality rate of the Harkin line, Nicky heads out into the snow with his father and brother to hunt some foxes and maybe heal a few wounds that happened in the wake of last night. However, as Nicky discovers some surprising knowledge about the past of his own family, Rachel discovers a single relative who managed to marry and survive the curse.
Hijacking her own hen night, Rachel manages to convince Portia to use her rudimentary knowledge of the arcane to try and do a seance for her great Aunt Arlene to discover how she knew her husband to be was the one. But as the drink flows, tongues loosen and inhibitions drop, Rachel’s supernatural dabbling gives her a reaction she didn’t expect.
With Last Night Of Freedom, SVBIGTH seems to be protecting itself from anyone who watches movies about supernatural curses and loudly proclaims that they’ve figured out a loophole to beat it. Be it how to out maneuver the demon from It Follows, to finding a back door around the Ring curse, we’ve probably even dropped a couple of theories ourselves about how we’d smugly side step a death mark. However, in order to show that it understands the game, Lisa Brühlmann’s second episode essentially plays it with us as Rachel and Nell commit a little B&E in order to work out its options. Aside from delving into the unseen paperwork that often lay behind the aftermath of blood curses, the episode also attempts to be patching over the fact that a surprisingly amount of people are accepting the notion that curses exist in the first place. Obviously, Jules is all in because he gained a hefty amount of childhood trauma after witnessing the death of Rachel’s mother back in the 90s, but a hefty chunk of the episode’s runtime is taken laying out the relationship between the Harkins and their habit of dropping dead after their nuptials purely in order for Nell to be fully convinced and Rachel to try and work out some sort of game plan.
Elsewhere, Nick is also finding out that the perfect existence he’s been raised to believe isn’t as cut and dry as he’s been led to expect – not only does Jules admit that he an Nell are filing for divorce, but Boris confesses that Victoria had an affair early in their relationship. His world well and truly rocked and his fiancée AWOL, Nicky seems to be having his faith shaken much in the same way Rachel did when she discovered the true details behind their first meeting and with the wedding only hours away, the timing could be worse.
I was beginning to get a feeling that director Lisa Brühlmann had drawn the short straw when in came to the episodes she got to helm. While Weronika Tofilska got to indulge fully in surreal paranoia for her episodes and Axelle Carolyn got to go balls to the wall for the fourth episode, it seems like Brühlmann was lumped with installments that went light on the horror. However, for her second and final entry, we find Last Night Of Freedom takes a final act swerve into the scary stuff that lurches us fully into Sam Raimi territory. While the sight of POV shots speeding through the woods evoke The Evil Dead, the fact that the main thrust of the horror takes the form of a seance means that favorable memories of Drag Me To Hell also arise. Thus we get a string of effective jump scares, some funky camera work and some nifty riffs on a reliable horror setpiece that goes to some crazy places, but while it finally gives Brühlmann a chance to have fun, there’s a feeling that such a sudden lurch from buttoned-down exposition to camera swinging, ghost related craziness feels like the show’s in danger of jumping the shark. However, while such overt shocks as oujia board jump-scares, a growling evil force careening through the corridors of the summer home and the already intimidating Portia getting possessed by the spirit of Aunt Arlene as her face drips blood may seem quite out-there for a show that’s kept mostly to delivering pulsing feelings of dread, it strongly hints that anything could happen in the final two episodes. Surely, the fact that Rachel and Nell share a drunken kiss before a temporarily possessed Portia breaks them up indicates that there’s still a lot of ground to cover before the subject of soulmates can confidently be laid to rest.
With the end in sight, Brühlmann completes her SVBIGTH run by enthusiastically dealing with the thankless task backstory and exposition. But while her final tip into full-tilt Raimi horror admittedly feels a little out of place compared to the usual slow burn shenanigans, she ensures that the groundwork is laid and the stakes raised before Tofilska returns to bring the season home.
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