So, About That Something Very Bad That Was Going to Happen …

Spoilers ahead for “I Do,” the finale of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

If you’re surprised by the bloodbath that concludes Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, you probably should have been paying more attention to the title. Yes, the warning is there from the jump — it would be a cheat for the show to not deliver on the promise of the name — but Netflix’s limited horror series is so suffused with dread that it’s less a question of whether these characters are hurtling toward doom and more if there will be any survivors. The finale is a suitably grotesque affair with a body count that’s impressive even by genre standards. After an eight-episode investment, however, it’s only natural to survey the wreckage and wonder what it all means.

In Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the countdown isn’t just for the inevitable mass slaughter but also for the nuptials of Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco). While Rachel and Nicky seem to have a relatively stable relationship, she is plagued by a vague fear that, well, something very bad is going to happen if she goes through with the wedding. That anxiety is only heightened after the couple arrives at Nicky’s family’s winter cabin, where they’re set to be married in five days. Aside from a nagging feeling of déjà vu, Rachel struggles to connect with the rest of the Cunninghams: Nicky’s overly doting mother, Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh); his taciturn doctor father, Boris (Ted Levine); his smarmy brother, Jules (Jeff Wilbusch); and his type-A sister, Portia (Gus Birney). The only Cunningham who can really get on Rachel’s wavelength is another outsider, Nell (Karla Crome), Nicky’s ex who is now married to Jules. Over the course of the first two episodes, Rachel becomes increasingly convinced that the family, beyond being simply unwelcoming, is actually trying to kill her.

The series’ first real twist is that the paranoid conspiracy Rachel imagines is in fact a bait-and-switch for what’s going on here. The Cunninghams are odd, sure, but they don’t mean any harm. The plan she uncovers turns out to center on Victoria, who is hiding terminal brain cancer from Nicky and wants Boris to help her die with dignity. That doesn’t mean that Rachel’s apprehension is off the mark, though. In episode four, she discovers it’s her own family that’s the problem. Rachel learns that her mother, Alexandra (Victoria Pedretti), also felt like something very bad was going to happen ahead of her wedding and then died from a sudden hemorrhage right after tying the knot. A man known only as the witness (Zlatko Burić) fills in the rest of the details. The witness’s great-great-great-grandmother made a deal with Death to bring back her soon-to-be husband, which Death agreed to do only if the man was her true soulmate. That bargain has now been passed down as a curse: All the children born from their union die horribly at sundown on the day of their wedding if they’re not certain their spouse is their soulmate. Because the witness was panicked by this prospect, he left his bride at the altar, at which point the curse was passed on. When the witness’s jilted love later married Thomas Harkin, Rachel’s ancestor, the soulmate curse fell on the Harkins. The witness, meanwhile, has been dealt his own punishment, forced to live forever and serve as the witness to all the doomed marriages in the Harkin bloodline. 

The curse backstory is a little convoluted, but what Rachel needs to know is simple. Since Nicky has proposed to her, she must marry her soulmate by sundown on her wedding day or she’ll die bleeding out like her mother. And if she chooses not to get married, the curse will be passed to Nicky and the rest of the Cunningham family. The back half of the season involves Rachel trying to make sense of her limited options. She begins to doubt that Nicky is her soulmate after learning their first meeting wasn’t quite as fated as he’d led her to believe, and any level of doubt could be enough to kill her. In the penultimate episode, she puts together a gruesome potion — her severed toe is a key ingredient — that’s supposed to turn her into Nicky’s soulmate, but she ultimately opts not to drink it. In the end, Rachel decides to put her faith in the strength of their relationship and marry Nicky without any guarantee that she’ll survive. Nicky, on the other hand, has discovered cracks in his parents’ seemingly perfect union, and he’s no longer sure about marriage. Knowing that Rachel never wanted to walk down the aisle to begin with, he calls off the wedding at the altar. They can be together without being husband and wife, he reasons. Besides, he never really believed in the soulmate curse. 

Unfortunately, the curse is very real, as Rachel furiously tells him. Nicky lied when he told her he believed her, which has created a rift between them that may be irreparable. After Nicky gets a pep talk from his mother, he decides he’s ready to try again, but at this point, the only thing Rachel is convinced of is that Nicky is not her soulmate, so she turns down his proposal. “I’m not gonna betray myself for you anymore,” she says. “I deserve a second chance.” The consequences are sudden and severe. Once the sun sets, the curse comes for the Cunningham family, including Victoria, Portia, and dozens of extended-family wedding guests, who all bleed profusely from their noses and eyes. It’s chaos and carnage; within minutes, the dance floor is covered in blood. In desperation, a panicked Nicky forces Rachel into finishing the wedding, which only succeeds in dooming her, too — she hemorrhages like her mother and collapses in the snow.

The next day, however, Rachel is miraculously revived. The previous witness has finally died, and she has now taken over his role. In terms of the other remaining survivors, Jules and Nell have been spared, despite their plans to divorce, presumably because Jules has come to believe that his wife is his true soulmate. More surprisingly, Nicky is still kicking, even though he married Rachel after the curse has spread. All it took was seeing most of his family drop dead to be sure that she is his one and only. Rachel, of course, has no interest in staying together at this point. She takes the witness’s truck and drives off toward her new life, tossing her wedding ring out of the window on the way. While Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is designated as a limited series, it’s easy enough to imagine Rachel’s future adventures as the witness. Given that the show probably would have worked better as a movie to begin with, though, stretching it out further doesn’t feel like the right move.

And the ending that we get packs quite a punch. There’s no question that the series delivers a climax that more than lives up to the title. On the other hand, it does raise a number of logistical questions. What counts as the family bloodline if Death can take out this many Cunninghams at once? Are distant relatives dropping dead all over the world? Does every thwarted nuptial from someone under the soulmate curse cause a mass-casualty event? But it’s not really worth getting bogged down in the details — the curse functions on a symbolic level, and not in the way you might expect from the outset of the series. The fear that Rachel is experiencing about her impending wedding are natural when you consider marriage as an institution that has historically subjugated women. When we first meet Nicky, he seems nice enough, but it’s all too easy to imagine him as a frequent horror trope, the selfish and manipulative husband of classics like Rosemary’s Baby or, to cite a more recent example, Ready or Not. Instead, the curse of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen turns out to stand for something even more relatable: uncertainty. “Are you sure he’s the one?” the witness says to Rachel in the first episode. We learn that this is a question he asks all members of the Harkin bloodline before their weddings. But as Nell wisely tells Rachel, “There’s no cosmic assurance that your marriage is going to work out.” What could be scarier than that? When Rachel continues to fret over whether or not Nicky is her soulmate, Nell puts it more plainly: “The only way to stop doubt is to make a decision, and then you’ll know.”

It takes Rachel until the finale to understand this. Her choice to not drink the potion is frustrating on its face — she had her toe amputated sans anesthesia for nothing! — but understandable when you consider the point that the series is driving home. Marriage is a “leap of faith,” as Rachel puts it in her vows. That’s terrifying, but it’s also kind of beautiful. “You can’t rely on certainty, because there is no certainty in marriage, in love, in anything,” she says. “The only certainty in life is death. So fuck certainty.” For Rachel, who has always feared the unknown, there is liberation in accepting this inherent unknowability. That she chooses to dive into a marriage with Nicky anyway is itself an act of love, and her embrace of uncertainty becomes, somewhat ironically, the surest sign that she’s making the right choice. The arc of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is not Rachel undoing her curse — it’s Rachel overcoming the anxieties and doubts that have plagued her by no longer working so hard to defeat them. Knowing that things might turn out poorly allows her to find peace.

Of course, that peace is short-lived. Unlike Rachel, Nicky had always had certainty in their relationship and in marriage as a whole. But over the course of their week at the cabin, that faith was shaken. Nicky has become obsessed with a kind of unattainable perfection, and that’s enough for him to call the wedding off, dooming his family in the process. Rachel calls him out for the deadly way he’s fallen short. “What you do, Nicky, when you love someone, is you believe the person that you love,” she says. “All you had to do was believe in me.” There’s a grimmer kind of irony in how seeing the curse kill his mother, sister, and countless other relatives is enough for Nicky to finally take Rachel seriously. “I promise I’ll always believe you from now on,” he insists once he’s already standing in a pool of blood. Had he taken the leap of faith with Rachel, they might both have survived without horrific collateral damage. Now, faced with a reality he can’t ignore, Nicky has landed on a new certainty about Rachel — something sturdy enough to save his life — but it’s come at an unspeakable cost.