Review “Below”: Josh Hartnett in Netflix’s Fun Sea Creature Series

BelowNetflix’s new six-episode thriller, begins with one of my favorite TV scenes of the year.

The prologue begins in 1986 Newfoundland with a family moving, uprooting their lives in the most wholesale way possible, taking their entire home – propped up on a barge and steered by a lone motorboat – across a bay.

The catastrophe occurs because, as the poster for Below promises, there is something in the water. Something big. Something huge. Something capable of sinking the entire house.

It’s a frightening 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 floating house imagery is powerful because it is real. Over the decades, demographic and industrial changes have led to several waves of government-sponsored relocations in Newfoundland, and the Internet is full of images of comparable examples of deep-sea house moves, although none end in death and destruction by submerged sea creatures. We know that!

Starting with a scene that feels real and feels real allows McKeown to get away with what is otherwise a silly creature feature, elongated but never beyond fun. There is a balance and it usually works. For every real-life filming location in Newfoundland, there’s a CG iceberg. For every verifiable fact about life in Newfoundland, there’s an American or British actor with a weird accent. For every plot thread or characterization that has the authenticity of a lived experience, there are a dozen plot threads or characterizations in which that “lived experience” simply means “watching a bunch of Spielberg movies.”

However Below never quite lives up to the potential of that opening scene, the six episodes – most chapters are around 40 minutes long – come together decently to form a fast-paced, sometimes funny, sometimes suspenseful story that’s basically Come from far away encounter Jawsor maybe Widows Bay with a sea monster instead of a curse.

Set 40 years after this preamble, Below stars Josh Hartnett as Calvin Penney, a fisherman in a town that has largely banned fishing and instead sends locals out in boats to collect chunks of floating ice and sell 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 declining population had voted against accepting government checks to move to a less isolated area. At the time, a 90 percent vote was needed to completely close Snook’s Arm, but a new vote is coming; this one requires only 75 percent support and is growing. Calvin and his family, including his sister Ruth (Willow Kean), a harbor master, and his slightly unhinged son Wade (Charlie Heaton), could represent the deciding ballots.

Although he devotes himself to Snook’s Arm, Calvin realizes that strange things are happening. First, a Portuguese fishing boat disappears without a trace. Next: Calvin brings a piece 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 and more people start disappearing and members start disappearing.

The only person willing to take Calvin’s concerns seriously is Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis), a marine zoologist doing research at a nearby facility. She begins to realize what anyone who has seen the first scene of the series or looked at the poster already knows: there is something in the water.

But is it a whale? A shark? A giant squid? An alien? A Godzilla? One of those very similar weird NBC lizard things Surfacea 2005 drama that TV critics mostly, if barely, remember?

And if there’s something in the water and it’s big and deadly, it might not be the ideal time for the annual Snook’s Arm reunion weekend, bringing mainlanders and willingly displaced people – including Calvin’s daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes) and son Jay (Rohan Campbell) – back to town with plenty of events planned on beaches, piers and other water-adjacent venues.

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

Filmed in and around Newfoundland, the series presents an evocative backdrop, enriched with details of past resettlement programs and changes in blue-collar maritime life as tradition and modernity collide. Even if you don’t know it in Newfoundland, Snook’s Arm is facing impacts of climate change that are universally identifiable.

It’s tempting to feel dismissive or distracted by the verisimilitude of the extensive accent work, which sounds like an unholy mix of Irish, Scandinavian, and Canadian. But if you look through interviews with real Newfoundland fishermen, you’ll hear that these accents, especially in rural areas, are pretty wild.

Are Hartnett and Heaton, who easily pull off the wackiest accents, perfect? Probably not. But is the weird thing they’re doing clearly wrong? I don’t think so. I appreciated their shared commitment and the credibility of the dark-eyed actors as father and son more than I was irritated by their theatricality.

Since Wade is defined by his love of magic mushrooms and off-roading on ATVs, the character is designed to be played big, and Heaton seems to be having fun. Hartnett, still in the midst of a years-long career renaissance, is a solidly haunted leading man—convincing enough with his brooding looks and nautical stunts that I don’t ask him why he sometimes looks like the leprechaun from Lucky Charms.

A bigger question, then, would be how Calvin’s other children — Hartnett, 48, father of a trio of 20-somethings, is mathematically plausible and guaranteed to age up millennial/Gen X viewers — were able to tone down their accents in just a few years on the continent. Stokes — who has a resemblance to Emilia Jones which adds to the series’CODA with trauma of supernatural origin instead of vibrations of deafness – is a possible escape.

Davis becomes a little more subdued as a scientist who I can only assume is from St. John’s or somewhere more urban, based on her version of the accent. She’s stuck with some of the show’s jargonier dialogue, but she really shines in moments of pure Spielbergian wonder as the Hooper figure gains hands-on experience with creatures she thought were theoretical.

If Davis is Hooper and Hartnett is very Brody… Below has more allusions to the Brody/Hooper flirtation than you may remember Jaws — that means Below needs a Quint, who would be David Wenham’s gregarious Steve when he arrives mid-season.

NOW Jaws is, of course, terrifying. And Widows Bay was, of course, very successful in alternating between scary and funny moments.

Below doesn’t reach these extremes very hard or very often.

It’s not really a comedy, but I laughed a few times and generally found the rapport between the characters to be well-infused with familial warmth and the kind of tensions of proximity that exist in the smallest of small towns. There’s no winking at the audience, no sense of camp or parody, just lots of engaging interaction, plus a few totally superfluous tertiary plotlines thrown in to stretch the story to series length.

And it’s not really a horror series. Part of the reason is that the creature(s) – I still have a few questions – must be treated evasively for technological reasons. So it’s a lot of oversized appendages and orifices, filmed under the cover of darkness as much as possible. The more you see of anything, the less scary it is, but there are bursts of low-budget madness and even gore that I enjoyed. The truth is, while I would have liked more creature effects or better effects in general, if the choice was between investing money in these areas or using resources to film in underrepresented areas of Newfoundland, Below made the right call.

Below charge, carried by solid sets and one or two unexpected twists, gaining momentum thanks to Mark Korven’s score and an eccentric soundtrack by “Fisherman’s Blues” by the Waterboys.

The ending is both conclusive and could set up a second season if Netflix abandons its initial labeling as a limited series. I urge the streamer to resist this temptation. These six episodes are a pleasant surprise, offering more than what initially appeared on the surface, but the story couldn’t work under the radar a second time.