TL;DR: Netflix’s Below starts as a cheeky Jaws riff and turns into a creepy cocktail of Newfoundland folklore, real resettlement history and creeping paranoia. Hartnett and Davis lead a gorgeous, unsettling creature series made for fall binges.

 

I’ll be honest: when I heard Netflix’s Below was a sea monster show starring Josh Hartnett, my brain instantly filed it under “Jaws, but make it chilly.” I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I was wrong enough to be pleasantly embarrassed. The series drops us into Snook’s Arm, a tiny Newfoundland outport where Calvin “Cal” Penney (Hartnett) fishes, harvests icebergs (yes, that’s a real job, and yes, I’m jealous) and welcomes his grown kids home for the town’s Come Home Year. Then the ocean starts acting like a level boss nobody warned you about. Fish disappear, hikers vanish and a Portuguese fishing crew goes missing, which forces Cal into a reluctant team-up with ocean researcher Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis).

What genuinely won me over is that Below doesn’t treat its town like a snack tray for the monster. It takes time to make Snook’s Arm feel like a real place with real people, which is the Stephen King school of horror, and I am a lifelong, card-carrying member of that school. By the time things start going bump in the deep, I actually cared who was standing on the dock. That’s rarer in streaming horror than it should be, where most towns exist purely to be evacuated by episode three.

The resettlement plot is the secret weapon I didn’t see coming

Here’s where Below surprised me most. The series opens on a historical resettlement from Cal’s childhood, featuring an entire house being hauled across a bay by boats, an image so bonkers I assumed it was a dream sequence. It isn’t. Newfoundland genuinely relocated whole communities, and a real Snook’s Arm was resettled in 2018, which gave me a mild “wait, what?” moment and a quick history lesson. That grounding makes everything that follows hit harder, because leaving home isn’t an abstract threat here but something these characters have already survived once.

When a new push for resettlement surfaces, it splits Cal from his kids and pulls in the Crocker family, the wealthy local dynasty that basically owns the town and clearly has plans of its own. Layer in a warming ocean that’s slowly killing the fishing way of life, and Snook’s Arm is under siege long before anything with suckers turns up. I love that the show lets real anxieties do some of the scaring. The creature isn’t the start of the town’s problems, it’s the final boss battle in a campaign that was already going badly.

Josh Hartnett and Mackenzie Davis make a great monster-hunting co-op team

Hartnett has quietly been one of my favourite genre guys since The Faculty and 30 Days of Night, and seeing him trade vampires for whatever’s down there felt like a natural sequel to his career. Cal is less a grizzled lone wolf and more a stubborn dad who won’t let his son Wade (Charlie Heaton) work the boat, which gives him a protective, slightly overbearing streak that feels very human. Davis has serious grounded sci-fi credibility from Halt and Catch Fire and Station Eleven, and she’s well cast as the scientist trying to convince a tradition-heavy town that something seriously unnatural is afoot. Local muscle plus outsider brains is a classic genre pairing, and Below plays it straight without overthinking it.

The Penney kids aren’t just set dressing either. Rohan Campbell and Ruby Stokes play Jay and Mary, while Heaton gets the juiciest and most disturbing arc as restless Wade. As a Stranger Things veteran, I couldn’t help grinning at the idea of Jonathan Byers swapping the Upside Down for something even soggier. Because each sibling has a stake in the resettlement fight, the family scenes never feel like the show hitting pause between scares, which is a trap a lot of creature features fall straight into.

The horror starts in Spielberg’s wake, then swims off the map

Below wears its Jaws fandom like a proudly faded vintage T-shirt. There’s a floating-remains jump scare that got me, a nasty shot of the creature charging a dock and even a sly line about Cal needing a bigger boat (for business, apparently, not monster slaying). The show also nails the “don’t show the shark” rule, teasing a giant eye here and a writhing tentacle there long before the full reveal. That restraint builds the sort of dread that CGI-happy monster shows usually blow in the first ten minutes like a rookie spending all their potions on the tutorial boss.

Then Below pulls the rug out. After an encounter with the creature, Wade starts sleepwalking and hallucinating, visited at night by the Old Hag, a Newfoundland folklore figure tied to sleep paralysis, and frankly, the stuff of my personal nightmares. The rest of the town begins to deteriorate too, and suddenly we’re in parasitic paranoia territory closer to The Thing or Annihilation than Amity Island. I adore this swerve. The question stops being “what’s in the water?” and becomes “what’s in my neighbour?”, which is a much nastier question to sit with.

Icebergs, ocean chaos and a setting that basically plays itself

Visually, Below is a looker. The iceberg photography is so gorgeous I kept forgetting to be scared, which is probably exactly when the show wants you relaxed, and the underwater sequences deliver proper mayhem once the gloves come off. Remote outport living, with freezing water on all sides and help a long way off, gives the series built-in claustrophobia. It’s the same “no one is coming to save you” isolation that made The Terror so suffocating, just with more nets and slightly better knitwear.

My gripes are fairly small but worth flagging. If you’ve watched a lot of creature features, some of the Jaws homage beats are easy to see coming, and the Crocker family fits a very familiar “shady rich people run the town” template. Anyone wanting pure tentacle carnage might also find the resettlement politics slow the pace. Personally, I think that drama is the glue holding the whole thing together, but your mileage may vary.

Verdict

Below is a seriously fun, atmospheric creature series that uses Jaws as a springboard rather than a crutch. The Newfoundland setting is rich, the real-world resettlement story gives it emotional weight, Hartnett and Davis make a solid duo and the shift into folklore-fuelled paranoia gives it a personality all its own. Familiar homage beats and a stock villainous family keep it just shy of greatness. If you love small-town horror, slow-burn monster reveals and stories where the place matters as much as the scares, add it to your Netflix spooky-season queue immediately. If you want wall-to-wall sea monster smackdowns, adjust expectations accordingly.