Below on Netflix drops Josh Hartnett into a Newfoundland town the sea is already emptying

BELOW. Josh Hartnett as Calvin in episode 101 of Below. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix

Below builds its dread inside a fishing town at the edge of the Atlantic where the horizon has always been a kind of threat, and the men who read it for a living have been reading bad news for a generation. Something is in the water now. The town’s real problem is that it was already emptying long before it had a monster to blame.

Below is a six-episode creature-horror series, and it wears the shape of that genre plainly. An unidentified sea creature surfaces off a remote Newfoundland community after a strange iceberg drifts into its waters, and a stubborn fisherman named Calvin Penney has to hold his family and his neighbours together as going out on the water turns lethal. Josh Hartnett plays Calvin; Mackenzie Davis plays a marine researcher who arrives to study the thing everyone else wants dead; Charlie Heaton plays Calvin’s son, Wade. It streams on Netflix. Say the premise aloud and you have heard a hundred monster stories, a town and a coastline and a thing that should not exist. What the series is reaching for sits underneath that, and it is harder to kill than any creature.

The place is the argument. Newfoundland’s outports are the most concrete stage in North America for a story about a way of life going under, and the show plants its horror there on purpose. When the cod fishery collapsed and Ottawa closed it in 1992, roughly thirty thousand people lost their work in a single stroke, and the decades since have been a slow tide of shuttered plants, aging harbours and young people leaving for the mainland. A town like Calvin’s is a town that has spent thirty years watching its future move away one ferry at a time. Drop a creature into that water and the metaphor almost writes itself: the thing from below is only the fastest of the deaths already circling the community.

That is the reading the setup invites, and it is worth being precise about what can be said before anyone outside the festival has watched all six hours. The premise is public, the cast is confirmed, the trailer is out. In it, an iceberg drifts in where no iceberg should be, the harbour empties of fish, and the townspeople gather at the shoreline with the particular stillness of people who already know the ocean can take everything. The rest, the shape of the creature, how the season closes, what the show finally decides its monster means, is not something a premiere piece can honestly claim to know. What can be said is what the series is built out of, and it is built out of a real wound.

Hartnett is the load-bearing choice. His recent run, the everyman menace of Trap, the quiet weight he carried through Oppenheimer, has been a study in grounded presence rather than movie-star gloss, and a fisherman clinging to a dying trade is exactly the register he has been working in. Around him the creative spine is Canadian and specific. Jesse McKeown created, wrote and showruns the series; Jamie Childs, Helen Shaver and Stephen Dunn direct; Karen Walton, Perry Chafe and Natty Zavitz share the writing. Chafe’s name matters here, his work has long been rooted in Newfoundland storytelling, and it signals a production that treats the outport as a home rather than a backdrop.

The company it keeps is easy to name. The creature-versus-town skeleton is the skeleton of Jaws, the story of a community that will not close the water because closing the water means admitting the season, and the livelihood, is over. The salt-worn, isolated dread is closer to The Terror, where the sea itself is the antagonist and the men are undone as much by each other as by the thing hunting them. And the six-episode limited shape puts it beside the recent wave of small-town siege series that trap a fixed set of characters inside a place they cannot leave. Below inherits all three and grafts them onto a coastline with its own documented history of loss.

There is a reason a creature series is arriving with a festival stamp rather than sneaking onto the schedule. Below had its world premiere in the Primetime program at the Toronto International Film Festival before its streaming release, a launch that frames genre television as something to be watched closely rather than half-watched on a phone. It is a bet that the audience for a monster on a Newfoundland shore is also an audience willing to sit with a grieving town, and that the two are the same viewer.

The season also has an outsider built into it, and that is where the drama sharpens. Mackenzie Davis’s marine researcher is the classic figure who arrives from away with instruments and theories, and lands in a community that has read this water by hand for two hundred years. Whose knowledge counts when the sea starts behaving impossibly, the expert’s or the fisherman’s, is one of the oldest arguments in any coastal town, and the premise sets it directly in motion between her and Hartnett’s Calvin. It is the sort of friction that lets a creature story ask a sharper question than whether the town survives: who gets believed while it is deciding.

Newfoundland brings its own grammar of the sea to that question. This is a culture whose songs and stories are full of the ocean as a taker, of sealing disasters and boats that never came back, of a coastline that gives a living and collects a price for it. A monster from below is not a foreign idea dropped onto the place; it is the literal form of a fear the outports have carried for centuries. That is the texture Below is working with, and it is what separates the setting from a generic seaside town, the horror has roots here that predate the genre.

For the practical questions readers tend to bring to a title like this: it is a scripted limited series, not a documentary, though the fishing-community collapse behind it is entirely real. It runs six episodes. The central cast is Josh Hartnett, Mackenzie Davis and Charlie Heaton, with Ruby Stokes and Rohan Campbell among the Penney family and Natasha Henstridge and Joshua Close in the town. And it lands in one place: Netflix, worldwide, as a single limited season rather than an open-ended show.

What a monster story set here cannot resolve is the part that was already broken. A creature can be fought, filmed, perhaps even beaten in the last hour; the emptying of the outport cannot. That is the tension Below is built on, and the most honest thing to say before the season streams is that its scariest idea is not the thing in the water at all, but the town on the shore that the water has been slowly taking for thirty years.

Below premieres on Netflix on 8 October 2026, a six-episode limited series created by Jesse McKeown and starring Josh Hartnett, following its world premiere in the Primetime section of the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.

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