Below review – a killer snot-berg causes chaos for Josh Hartnett
Below can be summed up as Netflix’s new Jaws-ish thriller in which a Newfoundland coastal community with strange Irish accents has trouble with a local sea monster. Josh Hartnett is the fisherman at the heart of things, playing his salty role with full conviction – because full conviction is essential for any creature feature to work.
Created by Jesse McKeown (The Umbrella Academy) and directed by Jamie Childs, Helen Shaver and Stephen Dunn, Below lands on Netflix as a six-part eco-creature feature. Hartnett stars as Calvin Penney, an unemployed widower bayman in the fictional town of Snook’s Arm, who is scratching out a living renting his house to tourists while trying to hold his family together.
The town is in economic decline, debating whether to take a relocation fee of $60,000 per resident. Then an iceberg rolls into the bay – and it has a stink to it. Hartnett’s Calvin sees dollar signs, until fishermen start losing more than their catch. A torn-off leg is an early clue that it’s not advisable to go out on the water, and locals soon start hallucinating sea hags.
This is where Below gets daft in the best way. The monster’s activity coincides with that killer snot-berg, a melting, mucus-covered iceberg that brings something ancient with it. Is it a giant squid? A Lovecraftian leviathan? The series wisely keeps it half-hidden, letting practical gore and maritime dread do the work.
Mackenzie Davis arrives as marine researcher Dr. Fonda Howander – a name only topped by local cop Jaxon Noseworthy – to deliver the climate message. “Oceans warming, permafrost thawing,” the show keeps reminding us. This could be TV’s first eco-creature feature, where the real enemy isn’t below the waves but above them.
Hartnett wrestles with an accent that straddles three at once – “Jesus friggin’ Murphy” and “what in the Jesus are you b’ys doin’ out here without a workin’ radio?” – but he sells it. As his psilocybin-guzzling son Wade, Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) brings welcome wild energy, gabbling about “the Penney curse.” Together they give the show surprising heart, a family drama under the entrails.
With roistering bars, chunky jumpers, sea-shanty vibes and talk of curses, the obvious comparison isn’t Jaws but Apple TV’s much-garlanded Widow’s Bay. Below doesn’t have that show’s artier pretensions; these six 40-minute episodes offer the instant-hit enjoyment of a Big Mac. Yes, it wraps up a bit neatly and the bombshells about corporate avarice are obvious from several fathoms away.
But when it wants to be just another monster caper – Calvin tearing through happy crowds yelling “Get back from the water!” like Chief Brody on the beaches of Amity – Below more than rises to the occasion. It is totally ridiculous, hunky sea-fun that, for all its efforts to the contrary, still quietly #makesUthink. Don your best flannel and dive in.
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