Last Updated on March 26, 2026 by Monica Castillo
There’s a moment early in Something Very Bad is Going to Happen when Ted Levine Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill himself picks up a skinning knife and goes to work on a dead animal. The camera doesn’t look away. Neither could I. It’s the kind of casting decision that works on two levels simultaneously: as pure character work, and as a wink from the show’s creators that says, we know exactly what we’re doing. They do.
Netflix’s new eight-episode series arrives with a pedigree that would make any genre enthusiast sit up straighter. Haley Z. Boston, who conjured the deranged fever dream of Brand New Cherry Flavor, serves as showrunner. The Duffer Brothers produce. Veronica Tofilska, who directed some of the most unsettling stretches of Baby Reindeer, helms four of the episodes. The talent behind the camera is almost aggressive in its quality and it shows in every frame. There’s a quality to the light here that I kept returning to throughout: no matter when a scene takes place, the show always feels like that specific hour before dawn when you’re not sure if you’re still dreaming. Civil twilight as production design philosophy. It works.
Recommended: Scarpetta (2026) Parents Guide
The setup is deceptively familiar. Rachel Harkin tattooed, sharp-tongued, perpetually rolling a joint with the casual ease of someone who has long since stopped apologizing for who she is is driving with her fiancé Nicky to meet his family at their sprawling compound buried somewhere in the wintry woods. Camila Morrone plays Rachel, and this is, without qualification, the best work she’s done. What Morrone understands about this character is that the wit and the banter aren’t personality traits they’re armor. Rachel is almost done with her doctorate in behavioral psychology, she reads rooms the way other people read faces, and she carries the particular competence of someone who learned very young that nobody was going to protect her. When she sits in that car and something in her gut starts pulling in the opposite direction, you believe every second of it.
Nicky, played by Adam DiMarco with a kind of warm, slightly hollow affability, is not entirely unlike the Albie he played in The White Lotus: educated, good-natured, and carrying a moral compass that may point slightly off true north. DiMarco is smart enough not to play the character as either villain or victim, and that ambiguity is, for several episodes, the engine the whole thing runs on. Are you sure he’s the one? That question posed to Rachel by Zlatko Burić in what amounts to the show’s most quietly menacing performance hangs over every scene like smoke.
The Cunningham family is a collection of specific dysfunctions rather than stock horror types, which is what separates Something Very Bad… from the very crowded field of gothic family-in-a-mansion thrillers. Jennifer Jason Leigh drifts through the compound as matriarch Victoria with that particular brand of controlled unraveling she does better than almost anyone working. Levine’s Boris sounds permanently on the edge of violence not explosive violence, the slow-building kind, the kind you don’t notice until it’s already happened. Jeff Wilbusch and Karla Crome fill in the black-sheep brother and his wife with enough detail that they feel like people rather than plot functions, and their son Jude slots neatly into the unsettling-child tradition while being just distinctive enough to avoid feeling borrowed.
The show understands something important about weddings: that the week leading up to them is already a pressure cooker of anxiety and old grievances and the creeping suspicion that you might be making the worst decision of your life. Something Very Bad… takes that very human dread and turns it inside out, splashing it across the screen with countdown-clock graphics THREE DAYS UNTIL ‘I DO’ that are genuinely, darkly funny. One episode uses home video footage from 1997 to excavate something terrible from Rachel’s past, and it lands with the weight of a door slamming in a quiet house.
Recommended: Young Sherlock (2026) Parents Guide
Paul Anka’s “You Are My Destiny” recurs throughout with the persistence of a bad thought you can’t shake, and the needle drops Perry Como, Charlotte Gainsbourg are deployed with the confidence of a show that trusts its own rhythm. One shot borrows the devil’s-eye perspective technique from Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, and it doesn’t feel like theft; it feels like a conversation between films.
What stays with me, though, is Morrone. There’s a scene I won’t locate it precisely where Rachel makes a decision that could go several ways, and the camera just stays on her face while she thinks it through. No music. No cutaway. Just a woman running the numbers on a situation that most people would have fled two episodes ago, choosing to stay because she loves someone and because leaving has never been the thing she does. It’s a small moment in a show full of operatic ones. But it’s the one I haven’t been able to put down.
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen — Parents Guide
Not rated by the MPA
Violence is present and felt. The most immediately striking instance involves Ted Levine — yes, that Ted Levine skinning a dead animal with a hunting knife in a scene the show clearly wants to unsettle you with, and succeeds. The series doesn’t wallow in gore for its own sake, but it doesn’t soften its edges either. There’s a cumulative menace to what’s depicted that younger viewers would find genuinely disturbing, less because of what’s shown than because of what the show lets you imagine just offscreen. One episode draws on home video footage to suggest something horrific from a character’s past. The implication lands harder than any explicit image could.
Sexual content is not a major element here, but the show orbits a wedding and the intimacy that comes with it. Nothing graphic this isn’t that kind of series. The darkness it’s interested in runs in a different direction entirely.
Drugs are woven casually into the fabric of Rachel’s character. She smokes marijuana openly and often on the road, at the compound, wherever it suits her. The show frames this without judgment, as part of who she is rather than a problem to be addressed. Alcohol flows freely in the Cunningham household, which probably won’t surprise anyone once they’ve met the Cunninghams.
This is a show for adults. Mature teenagers who have a strong stomach for psychological horror and slow-burn dread might handle it, but the content emotional as much as explicit is built for people who’ve already made peace with the fact that families can be genuinely dangerous places. Fourteen and under, firmly no. Sixteen and up, with the caveat that sensitive viewers of any age should know what they’re walking into.
