Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen: Tv Show of the Week

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Netflix review: eight episodes of a feeling that has no name.

It dropped on Netflix on March 26th. It is already in the top ten in most of the countries Netflix tracks. And if you have a taste for slow dread, for the horror of anticipation rather than the horror of arrival, this is the most interesting thing on the platform right now.

What It Is

Rachel and Nicky are five days from their wedding. Nicky is taking her to Summer House, the Cunningham family estate, tucked into snowy woods, where the celebrations will happen before the ceremony. It is beautiful. Remote. The family is welcoming in the way that sets something off at the back of your neck.

Rachel cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong.

She cannot name it. Neither can you.

That is the show’s entire engine. Not a mystery to be solved but a dread to be inhabited, for eight episodes, at the pace the show chooses rather than the pace you want.

Created by Haley Z. Boston, who made Brand New Cherry Flavor, and executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer after they wrapped up Stranger Things at the end of 2025, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is their first production together outside of Hawkins. Four of the eight episodes were directed by Weronika Tofilska, who directed Baby Reindeer. That combination of sensibilities, Boston’s slow surreal menace, Tofilska’s precision with psychological unease, is audible throughout.

What It Actually Feels Like to Watch

The comparison critics keep reaching for is Get Out. It is not wrong but it is not quite right either.

Get Out moves with purpose. Its dread has momentum. Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is less interested in momentum than in atmosphere. It lingers. It holds shots longer than is comfortable. It fills rooms with a particular quality of light that makes everything feel like the hour before something terrible.

The Wicker Man is probably closer. The sense of a protagonist walking deeper into something while the audience sees what she cannot yet see.

Camila Morrone carries this. Rachel’s paranoia is not played as hysteria. It is played as a woman who is paying attention and cannot get anyone to pay attention with her. That specific social experience, of noticing something that the people around you have decided not to notice, is what gives the show its psychological texture.

Ted Levine plays Nicky’s father. There is a scene where he skins a deer. If you know who Ted Levine is, you will understand what that scene does to you.

What Works and What Doesn’t

The first two episodes are exceptional. The atmosphere is established with real confidence. The Cunningham estate feels genuinely wrong in ways that resist easy explanation. The writing trusts you to sit in discomfort without offering resolution.

The middle section, episodes three through five, tests that trust. Not every episode earns its length. There are stretches where the dread starts to feel like delay. If you are someone who needs momentum to stay in a story, this is where you will decide whether to continue.

The show is aware of this, to its credit. It does not mistake atmosphere for substance. By episode six it begins to pay off what it has been building, and the final two episodes deliver something close to the chaos the title promised.

The ending is enough. It is not the ending you predicted, which is the point.

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Netflix Review: Worth the Hype?

At the TPM Library, we choose things that do something specific to the mind rather than just to the evening.

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen does something specific. It trains you to notice the texture of a situation before anything has happened. It makes you aware of how much information is present in a room before anyone speaks, in a family gathering before the first awkward pause, in a relationship dynamic before a single uncomfortable word is said.

That is not a trivial thing to practise. Most of us are not good at it.

The show is not perfect television. But it is interesting television, the kind that rewards a certain quality of attention and leaves you slightly differently calibrated than before you started.

All eight episodes are on Netflix now. It is best watched across two or three evenings rather than in one sitting. The dread needs room to settle between sessions.

Head to the TPM Library to see what else we have been watching.