‘Below’ Review: Josh Hartnett’s Silly Netflix Creature-Feature Is a Treat for the Eyes and Ears and Not Much Else — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Below" is a Netflix limited series created by Jesse McKeown and set in the fictional town of Snook's Arm, where Josh Hartnett's fisherman Calvin Penny still carries the trauma of his father's drowning 40 years ago during the Newfoundland Resettlement Program.
- Josh Hartnett plays Calvin opposite Mackenzie Davis as marine scientist Fonda Howander and Charlie Heaton as Calvin's eager son Wade, with the nearly four-hour story parceled out across 35-minute episodes and structured to allow expansion into an ongoing series.
- The central conflict pits the village against a giant squid that begins killing locals — including a captain swallowed whole and a half-digested moose dragged from the river — after the government again proposes relocating households to a bigger city.
- The review criticizes the show for padding its runtime with underdeveloped subplots (toxins in glacier ice, family melodrama, unquenchable-thirst infections, barely-resolved Come Home Year drama) rather than delivering enough creature-feature tentacle action.
- Mark Korven's eerie score is undercut by the show's retreat from horror, while Hartnett's Newfoundland accent work and Davis's contrastive vocal precision earn specific, repeated praise as the production's most consistent rewards.
- The series is identified as a Netflix Canada production whose questionable VFX inserts and pacing fall short of the standard expected from American Netflix creature-feature originals, despite scenery that the reviewer calls gorgeous.
Why it matters: For Netflix's creature-feature bet to work, "Below" needs to deliver on its squid — and this review says it doesn't. The 40-year-old Resettlement Program backstory and the show's heartwarming small-town framing do the heavy lifting while the creature stays scarce, leaving Hartnett's accent and the cinematography to carry viewers who came for tentacled terror will leave wanting. Whether Netflix greenlights expansion into an ongoing series depends on whether "d'ose hard Ds" fans outnumber horror fans.
Ask SkimNews
