‘Below’ Is A Messy, Mean, Lovable Sea-Monster Thriller
There is something magnificently stupid about the phrase "sea monster," which is probably why I will always love it. A monster in the woods can be a bear, a serial killer, a guy named Todd with a hatchet. A...
There is something magnificently stupid about the phrase "sea monster," which is probably why I will always love it. A monster in the woods can be a bear, a serial killer, a guy named Todd with a hatchet. A monster in your house can be a burglar, a ghost, your landlord.
But a monster in the ocean? That's the old black infinity itself clearing its throat and saying, "You people really thought you owned this?" Netflix's Below understands this. It is also, unfortunately, six episodes long, which means that before it can get down to the glorious business of Things From The Deep Eating People, it has to spend a lot of time explaining itself.
The setup is terrific. Snook's Arm, Newfoundland, is a battered fishing community whose inhabitants are already being squeezed by economic decline, depleted fisheries and a government resettlement offer. Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett), a widowed fisherman haunted by the death of his father decades earlier, has little interest in abandoning the place.
Then an enormous, foul-smelling iceberg arrives in the harbor, people start disappearing, hallucinations begin multiplying, and eventually we discover that there is something very large and very pissed-off moving around beneath the water. So far, so good. In fact, so good that you can practically hear John Williams warming up somewhere offshore.
But Below isn't simply Jaws with Canadian accents and more sweaters. Its real subject is what happens when a community that has already been told it is economically obsolete discovers that nature hasn't finished with it yet. The show folds together Newfoundland's history of resettlement, the collapse of traditional fishing, climate change, corporate interests and ancient folklore.
That's a lot of ideological cargo to strap onto a squid, but Jesse McKeown mostly gets away with it because he understands that the monster works best as an expression of something bigger than itself. Mostly. BELOW.
Josh Hartnett as Calvin in episode 101 of Below. Cr. Jan Thijs/Netflixôˋ 2025 Because here's where Below starts to wobble: it is simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough.
It wants to be an ecological horror story, a family drama, a regional portrait, a Lovecraftian mystery, a creature feature and a goofy Netflix binge. At its best, these things rub against each other and generate sparks. At its worst, you can practically see the writers backstage shoving another theme into the machine.
And yet I liked the hell out of it. Hartnett is the secret weapon. Calvin could easily have been written as Generic Troubled Fisherman No.
4, a guy whose principal dramatic function is staring grimly at the ocean while remembering his dead father. Hartnett gives him something more interesting: decency without sanctimony. He looks like a man who has spent his entire adult life being cold, wet and slightly pissed off, but he also has the exhausted tenderness of somebody who has spent years holding a family together with duct tape.
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Charlie Heaton, as Calvin's unruly son Wade, is the opposite kind of energy—an ambulatory electrical short circuit. Mackenzie Davis, meanwhile, arrives as marine researcher Fonda Howander and provides the necessary scientific counterweight, although the series wisely doesn't force these two into the most obvious romantic pairing.
Their relationship works better as an alliance between two people trying to determine whether the world has actually gone insane or whether everybody else has. BELOW. Mary Walsh as Linda in episode 101 of Below.
Cr. Jan Thijs/NetflixÂİ 2025 The setting may be the show's greatest star. Below was filmed in Newfoundland and Labrador, and the landscape has the kind of bruised grandeur that money can't fake.
The sea isn't a backdrop here. It is the show's enormous, indifferent protagonist. Fog rolls in.
Ice looms offshore. Fishing boats become toys. Houses look temporary.
The whole place feels as if civilization has parked itself on the edge of the abyss and is pretending not to notice the abyss looking back. Reuters notes that the production leaned heavily on local performers and community knowledge to capture the region's culture and distinctive dialect.
And when the monster finally gets busy, Below can be tremendous. The show has a taste for practical-feeling grime and sudden bursts of violence rather than endless digital spectacle. There's a claustrophobic submarine sequence that turns the familiar creature-feature machinery into something genuinely nerve-rattling, and the series repeatedly understands a basic horror principle: you don't have to show the damn thing every five minutes.
The problem is that Below occasionally explains the monster when it should be worshipping it. The first half has an almost mythic creepiness. Strange visions.
Old deaths. A community haunted by something it can't quite name. Then the mythology starts getting diagrammed on the whiteboard.
The show becomes less interested in the question "What the hell is down there?" and more interested in making sure we understand the answer. The back half consequently loses some of the weird, primordial dread that made the opening episodes so promising. Several critics have identified essentially this same structural problem: the six-episode format keeps things moving, but the finale rushes through mythology, plot and resolution instead of letting the accumulated atmosphere breathe.
Still, I would rather watch an overstuffed monster show that has too many ideas than another perfectly calibrated streaming product whose only ambition is to make you click "Next Episode." Below has personality. It has a place. It has a family you actually care about.
It has Josh Hartnett standing on a Newfoundland dock looking at an impossible thing in the water and somehow selling the idea that this is now his problem. Most importantly, it remembers that monsters are fun. The environmental allegory is sometimes heavy-handed, the finale could use another hour, and the show occasionally seems frightened that we might enjoy its squid without first receiving a lecture about capitalism and climate change.
But underneath all that is an appealingly old-fashioned piece of television: people in a remote place, something horrible in the dark, a bunch of damaged relatives forced to stop fighting one another long enough to fight the thing that's eating everybody. The ocean is rising. The ice is melting.
The town is dying. The monster is hungry. Honestly, folks, maybe just stay out of the water.
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