It’s a good year to be a fan of creepy island shows.
For viewers still chasing the high of “Widow’s Bay,” Netflix offers up “Below,” a tale of the small island community of Snook’s Arm in Newfoundland doing their best to make it through another hard year while billionaires attempt to buy them out of their homes, climate change wreaks havoc on the fishing industry … and something huge and monstrous is hunting people from the water.
Created by Jesse McKeown (“The Umbrella Academy”), who also serves as writer and showrunner on the limited series, and executive produced by Jessica Rhoades, Chris Hatcher, Josh Hartnett, Jamie Childs, Louise Sutton and Sharon Hall, “Below” primarily follows the story of down-on-his-luck fisherman Calvin Penney (Hartnett, currently also starring on the big screen in “Verity”), a single father of three adult children who has been struggling to make ends meet. Frustrated by his diminished catches and supplementing his income by renting out a room in his home, Calvin has never fully recovered from the death of his father, which he witnessed when he was just a child, when an entire house seemed to be swallowed by the sea with his father still inside. Immediately after that catastrophe, Calvin remembers looking into the water, and seeing a gigantic eye staring back at him from beneath his boat.
Fortunately for Calvin, Snook’s Arm is getting ready to celebrate a Come Home Year, a Newfoundland tradition where all of those who have moved away from the island return for the summer. That means that in addition to his neurodivergent son, Wade (Charlie Heaton, “Stranger Things”), Calvin will also have the help of his other children, Mary (Ruby Stokes, “Lockwood & Co”) and Jay (Rohan Campbell, “The Hardy Boys”). Mary also brings along her boyfriend, Noah (Kaleb Horn, “The Vampire Lestat”), who is waiting for just the right moment to propose.
But no sooner have all of the Penneys returned home than tragedy strikes Snook’s Arm, when Wade barely manages to escape a disastrous encounter with something that seems an awful lot like the creature that killed Calvin’s father.
Reeling from the news, the town goes into crisis mode. But the monster lurking in the water is far from the only threat facing the residents of Snook’s Arm. A powerful corporation is offering buyouts for their homes, a mysterious iceberg floats nearby, and some of the people are beginning to experience bizarre physical symptoms and ominous visions, which leave them questioning their sanity.
If this sounds like an ambitious amount of story to cover in a mere six episodes, that’s because it is, and it mostly works, carried by the earnest performances of the principal cast. Hartnett, Heaton, Stokes and Campbell, along with Willow Kean as Calvin’s sister Ruth, who serves as the Snook’s Arm harbor master, imbue the Penney family with history and warmth, grounding the series in what feels like a genuine family dynamic, full of the love and frustrations and grudges and hopes that tend to come with a lifetime of closeness (or very good acting).
Similarly, the town of Snook’s Arm — which also includes Mackenzie Davis (“Station Eleven”) as marine researcher Fonda Howander, who helps Calvin investigate the strange goings-on in the harbor — gives the impression of a place that existed long before the cameras of “Below” started filming, and will continue long after the series wraps. From the regional dialect and slang, to the clutter of the Penney home and the grime of the harbor, every shot of “Below” feels more like a glimpse into a long-inhabited community than a scripted and staged production. Similar to other island-bound series such as “Widow’s Bay” or “Midnight Mass,” “Below” excels in establishing its sense of place, history, and culture, making it easy to invest in the Penneys and their neighbors as their circumstances grow increasingly dire.
And the intrigue of “Below” is almost as compelling as its characters. McKeown describes the show (in his note to the press) as “what if ‘JAWS’ took place in Newfoundland,” but it’s more than that. From the strangeness of the iceberg to the bizarre symptoms of the residents of Snook’s Arm and the ominous presence of the creature in the harbor, “Below” raises far more questions than simply, “what’s in the water?”
That said, the series does stumble a bit in delivering its answers. Tonally, there is a shift from the first half of the season to the second, as what starts out feeling almost like a descent into supernatural horror becomes something quite different, and the juxtaposition doesn’t feel entirely intentional. There are a few subplots that don’t seem particularly consequential — Jay’s fling with the resident outsider, Jan (Natasha Henstridge); Jay’s debt to some nefarious individuals that inevitably come to collect, Noah’s missing engagement ring, and Calvin’s determination to convince his children to all stay home and join the family business for good — along with a semi-bottle episode that never fully pays off, and feels a little Scooby-Doo in its attempts to explain some of the weirder happenings on the island.
As the series progresses, it increasingly begs the question of whether it actually needs so many storylines, or whether it may have been better served by paring them down and focusing on the small handful that turned out to truly matter.
But those slight missteps don’t do much to get in the way of the overall effectiveness of the series, since the main attraction of “Below” is the Penney family, the nature of the creature in the harbor, and the question of how its presence affects the residents of Snook’s Arm. Where “Below” falters in its overly ambitious reach, it makes up for in wrestling with its central themes of family, community, and ecological conservation, culminating in a finale that delivers on character even if it abandons a bit of its plot.
By the time viewers reach the mostly satisfying ending of “Below” — which leaves the door open for more seasons, while providing a reasonable conclusion if these six episodes are all that we ever get — it’s easy to buy into the overarching conflict of Snook’s Arm, and to justify the lengths Calvin and his children are willing to go to in order to save their home from an existential threat. And it’s almost as easy to forget the meandering path the series took to get there, and the underdeveloped characters and storylines we met along the way.
If one season of “Below” is all we get, it’s a flawed but compelling glimpse into a world in which the scariest monsters are those we create ourselves, and nature is a stunning and ominous force we can never fully comprehend or control.
And if it continues on, there is plenty of story left to explore. Not just what is next for the Penneys and the other residents of Snook’s Arm, but also what our relationship is to the pieces of nature we don’t fully understand, the impact of climate change on the world around us, and our responsibility might be to the mysterious and stunning creatures who inhabit this planet alongside us.
Regardless of the future of “Below,” the series is worth a watch for anyone who enjoys a good creature feature, a solid family drama, a small-town environmental thriller, or all of the above.
“Below” is now streaming on Netflix.
The post ‘Below’ Review: Josh Hartnett’s Monster Drama Is a Flawed but Entertaining Netflix Binge-Watch appeared first on TheWrap.
