Highlights
- Josh Hartnett leads Netflix’s six-episode thriller Below
- The series follows a Newfoundland family as strange events begin unfolding in the water
- A mysterious sea creature sits at the heart of the story, but the series goes beyond traditional monster horror
- The thriller explores climate change, human greed and the decline of a close-knit community
- At its best, Below uses its horror elements to examine how people respond when their world begins to change
The ocean has always carried a sense of mystery, with huge stretches of it still unexplored. Netflix’s new limited series Below uses that uncertainty as the starting point for a gripping thriller, placing a mysterious creature at the centre of a story about family, survival and a community facing an uncertain future.
Created by Jesse McKeown, the six-episode series takes viewers to the small Newfoundland town of Snook’s Arm, where Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a widower still haunted by the death of his father decades earlier.
What begins as a story about something lurking beneath the water gradually becomes a much bigger examination of environmental decline, human greed and the difficulty of letting go of the past.
A family haunted by the past
Below begins in 1986, when nine-year-old Calvin and his family are moving from Little Pot Rock to Snook’s Arm. Their house is being towed behind their boat when a mysterious incident forces Calvin to cut the line, leaving his father to drown.
Forty years later, Calvin is still carrying the weight of what happened.
He has built a quiet life for himself, making a living by collecting ice for a local vodka brewery and running an Airbnb with his son Wade. His other children, Mary and Jay, return to the island during Come Home Year, giving the family a chance to reconnect.
But the reunion does not go as planned.
When the brewery rejects Calvin’s latest ice shipment because of its strange smell, he turns to local scientist Dr Fonda Howander, played by Mackenzie Davis. Around the same time, a series of disturbing incidents begins to affect the community, suggesting that something is seriously wrong with the water.
The monster is only part of the horror
This is where Below becomes more interesting than a straightforward creature thriller.
As an enormous iceberg emerges from the water and residents begin behaving strangely, Calvin and Fonda start connecting the events to what is happening beneath the surface. The mystery gives the series its horror hook, but the show is ultimately more interested in what people do when their environment and way of life begin to disappear.
The town is already struggling. Fishing has declined, resources are limited and the younger generation can see how little there is left to hold on to. Calvin, however, refuses to give up on the place he calls home.
That tension gives the series an emotional centre. The sea creature may be terrifying, but the human response to the crisis can be just as disturbing.
A tense thriller with something to say
At six episodes, with each running for 45 minutes or less, Below moves at a brisk pace. The series balances horror, family drama and environmental themes without allowing any one element to completely overwhelm the others.
Episode four, The Ocean Will Have Us All, is particularly effective. The creature takes centre stage, while the episode also explores how far people are willing to go when survival and personal gain are at stake. Its final moments are among the show's most unsettling and set up revelations that become clearer in the following episode.
Hartnett gives the series a strong central performance as a man trying to protect his family and his home while confronting memories he has spent decades trying to escape. There are moments when his Newfoundland accent feels less convincing, but they do little to undermine the overall tension.
Ultimately, Below works because it refuses to be just another sea monster story. Beneath its horror and suspense is a story about a community confronting environmental change, a family dealing with grief and people struggling to accept that the world they know may no longer exist.
McKeown uses the creature to explore something far more familiar than a monster from the deep: the fear of losing your home and the consequences of refusing to change with it.
Verdict: Below is a gripping and atmospheric thriller that uses sea monster horror to tell a surprisingly human story about climate change, greed and survival.
