Belowis now streaming on Netflix.
Set in a tiny, remote coastal town that’s suddenly facing a mysterious threat from the sea, Netflix’s new drama/horror series Below is in the unfortunate position of being compared to Widow’s Bay, the other show that already did that this year. It’s a “what if Jaws but…” vehicle for Josh Hartnett, on a career upswing with things like Oppenheimer, Trap (yes, Trap), and a great episode of Black Mirror. And while he’s doing all he can here, in a thick Newfoundland accent no less, to carry the six-episode series, Below can’t keep pace with the other show. A relatively solid first half of episodes is done in by the back three that messily (and occasionally ridiculously) tie up a story that hasn’t fully found its sea legs.
Hartnett stars as Calvin Penney, a man with a trauma-filled life dating back to his family’s forced resettlement from one remote town to the slightly less remote town of Snook’s Arm (which, in real life, was resettled in 2018). As seen in the opening scene from 1986, a young Calvin, his sister Ruth, his mother, father, and a resettlement officer tow the Penny family’s whole-ass house behind a tiny, puttering boat. But something terrible happens; the Penny’s house is pulled under water and Calvin’s father, Leo, goes down with it, and Calvin cuts the line from the house to the boat to save the rest of his family. During this accident, Calvin sees something in the water — a cliché that isn’t just used as marketing for Below, but is repeated several times throughout the series — that looks like a void. Or rather, the gigantic eye of a very large beast that lives in these waters.
Fast forward 40 years and a Hartnett-aged Calvin is still living in Snook’s Arm, now a widow, hauling pieces of flaked-off iceberg back to the docks to sell to make into iceberg vodka (also a real thing). A family called the Crockers owns the distillery, owns Calvin’s boat, and has investments in seemingly every darned thing in sight, including the nearby Ocean Science Center where lead researcher Dr. Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) studies marine samples and odd wildlife occurrences, like a flamingo landing on a resident’s roof. If you haven’t already guessed it, Below is about climate change and capitalism and what we’ve lost and what we can still preserve now that both of these things have become an insidious part of life. It’s just that Below doesn’t offer much more insight into these themes beyond broadly gesturing to the landscape and saying, with gumption, “look.”
It’s a shame its thesis is so shallow because it really does begin with a promising hook: A massive chunk of iceberg floats into Snook’s Arm harbor, but the ice from it, which could be a cash cow for the local ice harvesters, oddly isn’t right. At the same time, animals and people start mysteriously dying when they’re near the water (don’t forget, something’s in it!), and the first episode ends on a shocking image I won’t spoil. What is distinctly interesting about Below is that it lets you think the provenance of all the suspicious goings-on could be anything, real or mystical, before revealing that, actually, they can all be explained with science — marine zoobiology, to be specific — or, of course, the avarice of capitalism.
Below takes place during a Come Home Year, wherein residents and family who have scattered return for festivities and local traditions like kissing fish in Snook’s Arm’s one and only dive bar. Calvin has his mushroom-addled son, Wade (Charlie Heaton), still living with him at home — Hartnett and Heaton’s scenes together are some of the strongest in Below — but his other two 20-something kids who left the roost, Mary (Ruby Stokes) and Jay (Rohan Campbell), come back too, each with their own cosmopolitan issues.
Mary has a boyfriend she desperately wants her dad to like and Jay seems to be in some shit, getting texted threats like, “Your [sic] a dead man.” (Typos, very scary.) As the season wears on, the Penny family bench catches a severe case of too much and not enough, where nearly everyone’s arc could have used a lot more attention with a couple more episodes.
Below takes an especially wild turn in Episode 4 — that includes a deep-water scene that I kind of can’t believe exists in the context of some other not-so-distant real-life events — and everything that follows plays out as rushed attempts to provide answers to the series’ questions. There are some answers, sure, but they aren’t particularly satisfying. And it’s still full of holes, enough to sink a boat.
Verdict
Below starts with a promising hook: What the heck is a giant iceberg doing in a tiny Newfoundland town? The first half of the Netflix series successfully builds the many mysteries of what’s actually happening here before a hard tumble downward in the back half that doesn’t contain very many satisfying answers. Josh Hartnett doesn’t disappoint as the lead here, and some of the show’s best scenes are between him and Charlie Heaton, who plays his townie failson. But to use a fishing analogy: Below is the equivalent of thinking you’ve hooked a big one, but when you reel it in, all that’s on the end of the line is a clump of kelp.
