‘Below’ Review: Josh Hartnett Battles a Sea Creature in Netflix’s Likably Silly Newfoundland-Set Thriller

Below, Netflix‘s new six-episode thriller, begins with one of my favorite TV scenes of the year.

The prologue starts in 1986 in Newfoundland with a family relocating, uprooting their lives in the most all-encompassing of ways, taking their entire home — propped up on a barge and steered by a lone motorboat — across a bay.

Below

The Bottom Line A fun spooky-season surprise.

Airdate: Thursday, October 8 (Netflix)
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Mackenzie Davis, Charlie Heaton, Natasha Henstridge, Willow Kean, Ruby Stokes
Creator: Jesse McKeown

Disaster strikes because, as the poster for Below promises, something’s in the water. Something big. Something huge. Something capable of sinking the entire house.

It’s a creepy scene. But more than how it sets the tone for the story’s horror elements, it’s notable for how effectively it grounds the entire outlandish series, created by Jesse McKeown (The Umbrella Academy).

The imagery of the floating house is potent because it’s real. Over the decades, population and industrial shifts have led to several waves of government-sponsored resettlements in Newfoundland, and the internet is filled with pictures of comparable examples of open-sea house-moving — albeit none ending in death and destruction courtesy of submerged sea creatures. That we know of!

Starting with a scene that feels real and looks real lets McKeown get away with what is otherwise a silly creature feature, elongated but never past the point of enjoyment. There’s a balance and it generally works. For every actual Newfoundland filming location, there’s a CG iceberg. For every verifiable factoid about life in Newfoundland, there’s an American or British actor doing a bizarre accent. For every plot thread or characterization that has the authenticity of lived experience, there are a dozen plot threads or characterizations in which that “lived experience” just means “watching a bunch of Spielberg movies.”

Though Below never really lives up to the potential of that opening scene, the six episodes — most chapters run roughly 40 minutes — come together decently as a fast-moving, occasionally amusing, occasionally suspenseful story that’s basically Come From Away meets Jaws, or perhaps Widow’s Bay with a sea monster instead of a curse.

Set 40 years after that preamble, Below stars Josh Hartnett as Calvin Penney, a fisherman in a town that has largely outlawed fishing and instead sends locals out in boats collecting chunks of floating ice and selling them to a local vodka company.

Calvin lives in Snook’s Arm, a community on the verge of ceasing to exist. Five years earlier, the dwindling population voted against taking government checks to relocate to a less remote area. At the time, a 90 percent vote was required to shutter Snook’s Arm entirely, but a new vote is coming; this one requires only 75 percent support and it’s gaining momentum. Calvin and his family, including his harbormaster sister Ruth (Willow Kean) and his slightly unhinged son Wade (Charlie Heaton), may represent the deciding ballots.

Though he’s dedicated to Snook’s Arm, Calvin realizes that strange things are happening. First, a Portuguese fishing vessel disappears without a trace. Then: Calvin brings in a chunk of ice so strangely oily and smelly that the vodka company won’t buy it; Calvin wakes up one morning and a huge, new iceberg is in the harbor; more people start vanishing and limbs start washing up.

The only person willing to take Calvin’s concerns seriously is Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis), a marine zoologist researching out of a nearby facility. She begins to realize what anybody who saw the first scene of the show or looked at its poster already knows: Something’s in the water.

But is it a whale? A shark? A giant squid? An alien? A Godzilla? One of those weird lizard things from NBC’s very similar Surface, a 2005 drama mostly, if barely, remembered by television critics?

And if something’s in the water and it’s big and murder-y, maybe it isn’t a great time for the annual Snook’s Arm reunion weekend, bringing mainlanders and voluntary relocatees — including Calvin’s daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes) and son Jay (Rohan Campbell) — back to town with many events scheduled for beaches, piers and other water-adjacent venues.

Oh, and Natasha Henstridge is around as a woman named Janet who serves no purpose until she serves an important purpose, because otherwise why have Natasha Henstridge in your creature feature?

Filmed in and around Newfoundland, the series boasts an evocative backdrop, enriched by details about previous relocation programs and shifts in blue-collar maritime life as tradition and modernity have butted heads. Even if you don’t know from Newfoundland, Snook’s Arm is dealing with ripples from climate change that are universally relatable.

It’s tempting to feel dismissive of or distracted by the verisimilitude of the wide-ranging accent work, which sounds like some unholy mixture of Irish, Scandinavian and Canadian. But if you go down a rabbit hole of interviews with actual Newfoundland fishermen, you’ll hear that those accents, especially in rural areas, are pretty wild.

Are Hartnett and Heaton, doing easily the most outlandish of the accents, note-perfect? Probably not. But is the odd thing they’re doing clearly incorrect? I don’t think so. I was more appreciative of their shared commitment and how believable the dark-eyed thespians are as father and son than I was irritated by their theatricality.

Given how Wade is defined by his love of hallucinogenic mushrooms and off-roading in an ATV, the character is designed to be played big, and Heaton appears to be enjoying himself. Hartnett, still in the midst of a multi-year career renaissance, is a solidly haunted leading man — convincing enough with his brooding glances and nautical stunt-work that I didn’t ask why he sometimes sounds like the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

A bigger question, then, would be how Calvin’s other children — the 48-year-old Hartnett as father to a trio of 20-something kids is mathematically plausible and guaranteed to make millennial/Gen X viewers feel old — were able to tamp down their accents in just a few years on the mainland. Stokes — who has a resemblance to Emilia Jones that adds to the series’ “CODA with supernaturally-driven trauma instead of deafness” vibes — is a possible breakout.

Davis gets to be a little more understated as a scientist who I can only assume comes from St. John’s or someplace more urban based on her version of the accent. She’s stuck with some of the series’ more jargon-y dialogue, but she really shines in moments of pure, Spielbergian wonderment as the Hooper-esque figure getting to gain practical experience with creatures she’d assumed were theoretical.

If Davis has the Hooper part and Hartnett is very Brody — Below has more hints of Brody/Hooper flirtation than you might remember from Jaws — that means Below needs a Quint, which would be David Wenham’s gregarious Steve when he arrives at midseason.

Now Jaws is, of course, terrifying. And Widow’s Bay was, of course, very successful at alternating between scary and funny bits.

Below doesn’t hit those extremes very hard or very often.

It isn’t really a comedy, but I laughed a few times and generally found the rapport between the characters to be appropriately layered with familial warmth and the sort of proximity-driven tensions that exist in the smallest of small towns. There’s no winking at the audience, no sense of camp or parody, just a lot of appealing interactions, plus some wholly superfluous tertiary plots added to expand the story to series length.

And it isn’t really a horror series. Part of that is because the creature or creatures — I still have some questions — have to be treated evasively for technological reasons, so it’s a lot of oversized appendages and orifices, shot under the cover of darkness whenever possible. The more we see of whatever it is, the less scary it is, but there are bursts of low-budget zaniness and even gore that I appreciated. The truth is that, as much as I might have wanted more creature effects or better effects in general, if the choice was between pouring money into those areas or using resources to film in underrepresented patches of Newfoundland, Below made the correct call.

Below charges along, driven by solid set pieces and one or two unexpected twists and turns, gaining momentum from Mark Korven’s score and an eccentric soundtrack bookended by The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues.”

It reaches an end that’s both conclusive and could set up a second season if Netflix backs away from its initial labeling of this as a limited series. I’d urge the streamer to resist that temptation. These six episodes are a pleasant surprise, offering more than what initially appeared on the surface, but the story wouldn’t be able to operate below the radar a second time.