Time is rapidly ticking away for the players of Hayley Z. Boston’s progressively frenetic horror farce and with only two episodes to go, the show has picked up the already frazzled pace. I have to say, as we venture into the penultimate installment of Netflix’s latest must-see splurge of content, I was worrying how the show was going to spread a rather contained story over 8 episodes, but the constant shifting of pace, tone, stakes and weirdness has made every entry so far extremely fun to watch.
However, after a four-episode absence, it’s time for Baby Reindeer’s Weronika Tofilska to grab those reins once more as we bring the season home. But with only an hour before our flustered heroine has to say the most important and impactful “I do” of her entire life, can the suspense sustain before we take that final, dread inducing walk down the aisle?
You read that right just now, we only have one hour left until the wedding starts, and while everyone is rushing around and getting the Cunningham’s secluded summer home ready, Rachel has some other, desperate preparing to do. However, first order of business is to ensure that the wedding happens at all as, during a tumultuous night (which we’ll get more into in a mo’), the ailing Victoria has slipped into a coma. While Portia wants to call everything off, Boris is more than happy to move up euthanizing her as he can’t bear to see her like this. However, if Rachel doesn’t get married by 4:40pm (sundown), then she’s doomed to die in a rapidly widening pool of blood the second her time runs out.
However, after following the clues given by the spirit of her dead Aunt Arlene and going through Portia’s book of spells, Rachel thinks she’s figured out a way to ensure to beat her blood curse – it’s just going to take a little prep work. Yes, their little seance left Portia temporarily possessed and with a broken nose, but the utterance she made of “something living, something dead, something stolen, something red” turns out to be the ingredients of a spell that’ll turn a panicking Rachel into Nicky’s soulmate even if it means that it’ll change her personality irrevocably. However, she’s only got a hour to gather some really eccentric ingredients and while “something stolen” is easy enough as snipping some of the unconcious Victoria’s hair and “something living” means she has to collect her lovers seed (you heard me), the other two require more harrowing sources. “Something red” means collecting blood from an enemy, which is eventually sorted with the arrival of the smug looking Witness, but “something dead” requires something far more extreme – a bone has to be removed from the bride-to-be and invested with the rest of the concocted of hair, blood and semen. While I struggle to come up with a printable name for such a cocktail (the Bloody Awful?), two questions arise – can she gather everything together before the ceremony, and even if she does, will she drink it if it means it could change her entire personality…
While the other directors attached to SVBIGTH have done superlative work over the past four episodes delivering thrills and exposition, I’ve been itching for Tofilska to return thanks to her stuff carrying more of a deeper, visual snap in its tail and she certainly doesn’t disappoint here. Basically unfolding almost in real time and mostly taking the form of long, sweeping takes that fiendishly hides various edits to immerse us totally in Rachel newest waves of panic. However, while Tofilska’s previous episodes dunked our hapless lead in freezing cold troughs of uncertainty and paranoia, “Something Living, Something Dead, Something Stolen, Something Red” now finds Rachel filled with awful certainty as she goes about her mission and collects some very strange ingredients.
Once again, the show uses its wedding scenario to perversely mock the excitement/blind panic felt before you connect yourself to another in holy matrimony, but interestingly, while we’ve never seen Rachel move with such purpose, her internal opinion of herself is all over the place. She seems to have convinced herself that even if she isn’t Nicky’s soulmate, it’s worth having her personality forcibly transformed to fit the bill via a magic spell, especially if it means it will save her from a genuinely terrible death. The feeling of your individuality evaporating before taking the marital plunge is something that many people feel (or fear) and even worse, some convince themselves that they’re not worthy enough, hoping that the “goodness” of their partner will offer them some sort of salvation.
SL,SD,SS,SR takes full advantage of this, but also rocks the boat back in the other direction in some fairly ingenious ways – Rachel noticing that she’s been painted into the family portrait looking like a blank-faced Stepford wife is a particularly subtle way to give her pause for thought. But you also feel that her desperation to get her morbid potion made is cementing her feelings of lessened worth. Also, it’s fairly alarming that she’s putting all her faith on Nicky being the perfect guy when it’s she who is willing to make all these deranged sacrifices.
As Rachel scampers around, snipping hair, snatching blood and – in a fantastically disgusting moment – scrape Nicky’s semen off her thigh as it trickles out of her after an impromptu bout of sex – the tension and dread builds and Tofilska is wise enough to break up the frantic pace with occasion quiet moments to keep us off balance, but the stand out of the episode proves to be the obtaining of the something dead. Enlisting the help of Nell and Jules (who are fast becoming my favorite characters) Rachel opts to have one of her pinkie toes cut off in order to obtain the bone required with a minimum of prep or anesthetic. Tofilska ensures that the moment is excruciating as it can be as it’s punctuated with the occasional bone dry quip to really drive the insanity of the situation home, but while the moment goes a long way to show how much Rachel wants to live, we’re bizarrely finding that the insanity of the past week has actually been bringing them back together and their chemistry has a noticable lack of acidity since getting caught up in Rachel’s issues.
However, with only one episode left, there’s still all to play for – although, considering the title and the show’s habit of mining worse case scenarios, we’re in store for a lot of blood, especially considering that we never actually see her drink the potion it took her an hour of panicking to make.
SVBIGTH ploughs through any penultimate episode issues by hitting the seventh installment at a full sprint and only easing off when it needs to deliver some well placed character beats. Will Rachel die? Will she pass the curse on? What will the Witness do? What will be the cost to the Cunningham family? We’re only an episode away from finally discovering what the bad thing is that been teased since the start and I can’t wait. Please be upstanding for the bride…
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