Fiancés Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco) are driving to his family’s cabin in the woods, where they’re due to get married in less than a week. It should be a time of butterflies and excitement, but Rachel has a nagging feeling – a stomach-churning feeling – that something very bad is going to happen.
Is this an extreme case of pre-wedding jitters, or is she right to trust her gut? Rachel’s mother died when she was a baby and she’s estranged from her father, but Nicky has a close-knit family who are just dying to meet her. Could this be the root of her tension? Either way, Rachel’s stress levels are so high that when a gnarly old guy approaches her in a dive bar, she stabs him in the hand.
The Cunninghams’ “cabin” is actually a snow-capped mansion with its own atrium – a design detail that will come into its own later – and his family turns out to be, well, intense. Nicky’s brittle sister Portia (Gus Birney) has decided to supersize their supposedly low-key wedding, while his rude brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) greets Rachel with a grim childhood story of being terrorised by a supernatural figure in the woods. His own marriage to relatively level-headed Nell (Karla Crome) hardly seems to be on solid ground.
Rachel quickly becomes convinced that one or all of the Cunninghams want to kill her, but in this instance, her paranoia proves to be misplaced. Exec produced by Stranger Things masterminds the Duffer Brothers and created by Haley Z. Boston, who’s written episodes of Brand New Cherry Flavor and Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities, this series is never that straightforward. It’s deliberately bewildering and asks you to keep your wits sharp – just as Rachel has to as her backstory becomes more outlandish.
Though it’s sometimes derivative – the early episodes borrow liberally from Twin Peaks in the way they evoke a sense of smalltown menace – this series doesn’t skimp on style or surprises. Crucially, it’s both scary and funny along the way. Whenever she wafts in as the Cunninghams’ vague matriarch, Jennifer Jason Leigh fills the cabin with a sinister inertia that adds to the mounting dread. A wedding rehearsal montage in which Rachel and Nicky are forced to trot out their meet-cute story time and time again is one of several clever moments.
If anything, there’s a bit too much going on. Though none of the eight episodes outstay their welcome, it’s probably two too many overall – and the pace slackens in the series’ overstuffed second half. Still, Boston brings her disparate threads together for an operatic finale that’s a right bloody mess in the way she intended. Something very bad does indeed happen, but you definitely won’t see it coming.
‘Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen’ is streaming now on Netflix