Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Review: 8 Episodes of Pure Dread

Netflix made a horror show about the scariest thing imaginable: Meeting his family

Okay, so the title is incredibly on the nose, and I respect it. No false advertising here.

Rachel is five days out from marrying her fiancé, Nikki, when they head to his family’s remote, snowy vacation home for an intimate wedding.

She’s paranoid, superstitious, and cannot shake the feeling that something terrible is coming. Spoiler: something terrible is coming.

This is weird, dark, deliberately uncomfortable television. Exactly my thing. I watched the whole series in under 24 hours, and I regret nothing.

TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿/5

What Seems to Be Going On

The show operates in layers.

On the surface, it’s about a woman meeting her future in-laws and slowly realising they are deeply, disturbingly strange. The family is dysfunctional in ways the show takes its time revealing, and that deliberate vagueness is doing a lot of work early on. Nobody is warm to Rachel. Everything feels slightly off.

The camera lingers on faces a beat too long and catches micro-expressions that transfer their unease directly into your nervous system.

Then the lore kicks in. There’s a generational curse tied to soulmates, death bargains, and marriage, and once the show commits to explaining it properly, things get significantly more unhinged.

It’s horror built around a woman at a threshold moment in her life, where the terror is intimate and domestic before it’s supernatural. There’s also a strong It Follows energy with the curse mechanics.

What Worked

Camila Morrone carries the entire Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen show. Rachel is paranoid and anxious and right about everything in ways that are satisfying and heartbreaking simultaneously. She’s on screen for nearly every single scene and never loses the thread of who this woman is, even when the plot is throwing completely unhinged scenarios at her.

Episode four is a masterpiece. The reveal of the curse’s origins, the backstory for one of the supporting characters, and a casting choice that made me physically gasp.

Victoria Pedretti showed up, and it felt like an event. The writing in that episode, specifically, is so tight and so nasty that I immediately rewound certain scenes to catch details I’d missed.

The cinematography is genuinely stunning. The camera moves through the house like it’s haunting it too, tracking characters through dark hallways and rotating around spaces in ways that create constant low-level dread. It earns its comparisons to classic horror visually.

The supporting cast is stacked. Ted Levine has a monologue near the end that hits hard. Jennifer Jason Lee does unnerving quietly and well.

And Gus Birney as Porsche is the funniest character in the whole show, which matters more than it sounds because the humor is the only thing that gives you breathing room between the horror.

Check out Watch Curry Barker's Obsession. I’m Not Asking.

What Didn’t Work in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen

The pacing drags in the middle. There are stretches across episodes five and six where the wheel-spinning becomes noticeable.

Rachel is also written to cave repeatedly to things that feel wildly out of character for someone established as strong and self-assured. I understand why narratively, the discomfort needs to escalate, but there were moments where I wanted her to flip a table and leave.

Some threads are also left genuinely unexplained in ways that felt less mysterious and more unfinished.

My Final Verdict

Dark, strange, beautifully shot, and deeply uncomfortable in the best possible way. This is a horror show about whether you can trust the person you love and the family you’re marrying into.

Which is terrifying with or without a supernatural curse. Watch it, preferably not alone.

Has anyone else watched this? What did you make of that ending? Tell me in the comments.