Engaged couple Rachel and Nicky head to Nicky’s sprawling family home for their wedding, where strange, unsettling, and finally deadly events begin happening.
The act of getting married is still, even in these purportedly modern times, a huge event in most peoples’ lives. Some people have giant expensive weddings with tons of guests at exotic getaway locations, some people simply head to the courthouse with a gang of family and friends in tow, some people just straight-up elope off to Vegas or wherever, and some people, for a myriad of reasons or none at all, simply choose not to get married. For those that do choose to get married, the act of introducing your beloved fiance to your family for the first time is nerve-wracking, and more than one couple has split because the other couldn’t handle the potential in-laws. Make double-damned sure you know where your grandmothers’ wedding dress is, and lets dive into this!
So Nicky (Adam DiMarco) is bringing his dark and tragic girlfriend Rachel (Camila Morrone) back to his parents estate, to meet them and the rest of his odd little immediate family, and get married in five days time. Starting off with the siblings, sister Portia (Gus Birney) is this utterly weird combination of Barbie Paris Hilton with only occasional flashes of Nancy from The Craft, and she has declared herself Wedding Planner-zilla incarnate, regardless of what kind of wedding Nicky and Rachel may have had in mind. Elder brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) is sardonic, ironic, and revels in being jaded after a lifetime of difficulties from his family. Jules and his wife Nell (Karla Crome) seem to be the only ones capable of being entirely honest, with each-other and by extension with everyone else, and they both do seem to enjoy lovingly taking pot-shots at each-other the kind of which can only come from being the living embodiment of the old adage, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. Even Jules’ poor son Jude (Sawyer Fraser), the only grandchild here at Nickys’ families’ home, is what one might call unusual, if one was being generous, dwelling on strange things like “the Sorry Man” as he does. The legend did come from his dad, after all.
And then there’s dad and mom, Dr. Boris Cunningham (Ted Levine) and Mrs. Victoria Cunningham. Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is the queen, the empress, of this little family kingdom, her word is absolute and her rather commanding presence is what holds this family together. Boris is a man’s man who likes to hunt, and does taxidermy, and even digs graves on his own. Boris does what needs to be done, but all according to Victoria’s wishes; he is a man bowed low by the simple fact that he deeply and absolutely, loves a woman stronger than himself. And what does Victoria love? Her family, mostly. Obedience, certainly. Victoria’s love is a transactional long-term investment, and her interest rates are abysmal. Only Nicky, as the baby of the family, can claim any kind of victory with Victoria, as she reserves her smothering version of love mostly for him.
Nicky’s families’ home is very old and while not necessarily run-down, there is a deeply unsettling presence that blankets the grounds, sitting patiently in the shadows, waiting. This presence seems to take on some sort of abyssal life through the childish imaginings of grandson Jude, and his fathers encouragement doesn’t help. But the arrival of the blunt and quite open Rachel, whom baby-prince Nicky intends to marry with his beloved overbearing mother there to witness it, opens the floodgates of darkness and secrets the Cunningham family and Victoria in particular have been elegantly, desperately, trying to hide.
Everything in the Cunningham estate generally goes along with Victoria’s wishes by rote, but hearing her confession that cancer is consuming her and she has refused all treatments, instead preferring to die while still knowing herself, throws the wedding plans into absolute chaos. Most are insistent that the wedding go through, so that Victoria is of sound mind and ever-sharp tongue here to witness it. Nicky proceeds to just fall apart for a bit, while Rachel, who had misgivings over the idea of getting married at all in the first place, goes back to overthinking everything while simultaneously trying to please Nicky’s strange family demands. Ultimately, everyone decides the wedding just has to go forward, and the plans for a grand wedding in five days’ time take on a desperate, countdown-to-doomsday kind of vibe. Especially when Rachel gets sent on a journey of discovery, of her own personal history.
So, we can all agree that the Cunninghams are a righteously strange family, with weird family traditions that often border on just plain cruel, but none of it can be said to be actually supernatural (thus far). Instead, after Rachel loses it on Nicky when she discovers he secretly invited her estranged-for-years father Jay Holman (Josh Hamilton) to their wedding, a whole series of bizarre occurrences later, Rachel meets the Witness (Zlatko Buric).
The Witness gives a whole long explanation as to how, and why, he cursed Rachel’s entire bloodline, and it has to do with, oh lawd here we go, True Love. Having been denied his True Love with an ancestor of Rachels’, the Witness is now cursed to witness every single last wedding of the entire Harkin bloodline. Why do they need a Witness, you ask? Every person of the Harkin bloodline, once they’ve chosen a mate and declared that that person is their Soul Mate ™ , then has a countdown of five days in which to wed that person, or else die a pretty nasty, very bloody, death.
Who, or what, decides whether or not a given person is another persons’ Soul Mate ™, True Love, etc etc, is up for debate, but the idea that a generational curse came about because of the power of one insane persons’ absolute obsession with the unrequited love of another person, is really (pun intended, sorry not sorry) heartbreaking, and soul-crushing. And it’s precisely that sort of thinking, the ripple repercussions over generations and the damage done to plenty of completely innocent people whose only crime was apparently having the occasional second thought about the person they married, that drives Rachel to at least try, to try and fight for her and Nickys’ love. But how to fight a family curse, an encroaching darkness, and her own doubts all at the same time?
The show is called Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, and though some rather insane things happen in each episode, it’s the final episode where indeed, several something very bads happen. And while most can agree that True Love really is transformative, what happened to the Cunninghams and Rachel at the end, seemed entirely unfair. A good deal of love, especially the unrequited kind, is entirely unfair anyway.
Catch all the bloody bride business in Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, on Netflix now!