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The Duffer brothers’ new Netflix horror series takes “pre-wedding jitters” and ramps them up to “supernatural extremes”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. The result is a “surprisingly thoughtful, satisfyingly bloody take on the impossibility of absolute romantic certainty”.
Nervous bride-to-be Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco) appear at first like a happy, “promising match”. The action begins five days before their wedding – an intimate affair set to take place at Nicky’s parents’ holiday cabin in the woods.
But Rachel soon begins to sense “something is not right”. Driving to the venue, “ill omens seem to abound”: the couple overhear “snatches of a disturbing conversation” and pass a car “scribbled with ‘just married’ in paint the colour of blood”.
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“Wait until she gets there,” said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. The “creepy” cabin is decorated with “taxidermied Irish wolfhounds” which Rachel is told never to look directly in the eye, and each one of Nicky’s relatives is “awful, emotionally disturbed, or plain loony”. Disturbing tales of “evil” monsters lurking in the woods don’t help things. “Run, Rachel!”
It’s a “macabre and unsettling” show filled with plenty of “blood and gore”. But the “real horror”, it transpires, would be “realising that you’ve married the wrong person”. As the “claustrophobia and hysteria build”, it is Morrone’s stand-out performance that “grounds everything in some sort of reality”.
I couldn’t help feeling “this would have worked better as a feature film”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. At times the pacing dragged and some of the “tortuous plotting” felt like it was “simply stalling for time”. There were issues too with the lighting: many of the scenes were so “dark and colour-washed that it’s hard to tell what you’re even looking at”.
The poorly lit cabin does leave you wondering how the family are “reading cooking instructions”, said Rhik Samadder in The Guardian. But I found it “terrifying”. The show has “fun with the trappings of weddings from hell” and excels in its “limbo-like scenes suffused with dread”. Above all, “it gives a chilling new meaning to having cold feet”.
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Irenie Forshaw is the features editor at The Week, covering arts, culture and travel. She began her career in journalism at Leeds University, where she wrote for the student newspaper, The Gryphon, before working at The Guardian and The New Statesman Group. Irenie then became a senior writer at Elite Traveler, where she oversaw The Experts column.
