Josh Hartnett Leads Netflix's Sea Monster Thriller 'Below' — SkimNews
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- "Below" is a six-episode limited Netflix series — each episode running 45 minutes or less — created by Jesse McKeown and streaming now.
- Josh Hartnett plays adult Calvin Penney, a widower in Snook's Arm, Newfoundland, still haunted by his father's 1986 drowning, when nine-year-old Calvin was forced to cut the tow line between boat and house.
- Calvin and his son Wade (Charlie Heaton) scrape by collecting ice for a local vodka brewery and running an Airbnb after fishing dried up in the community.
- Dr. Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis), who runs the local science center, joins Calvin's investigation after the brewery rejects his ice haul, son Wade suffers a horrific accident, and residents of Snook's Cove begin acting oddly.
- Episode 4, "The Ocean Will Have Us All," is singled out as particularly riveting, with the reviewer highlighting its "gutting displays of inhumanity" as people pursue selfish gains.
- The reviewer frames the series as "more than it appears" — a horror thriller whose deeper subject is a man clinging to a decaying past, a grieving family, and how greed "can create monsters," set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
Why it matters: The reviewer makes clear that the sea creature is the hook but not the point — the real subject is a Newfoundland fishing community eroding from within and without, making the horror a vehicle for dramatizing how a warming world forces impossible choices on small towns.
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