[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
Netflix is setting sail into spooky season with a moody, engaging treat, no tricks, this Thursday when Below drops its six-episode season on the streamer after a fancy global premiere last month at TIFF. The mostly Canadian production, which boasts a deep, deep bench of folks from shows I was besotted with back in the day and still am, is a scary, darkly funny, heartfelt, and ultimately, very entertaining tale of a seafaring Newfoundlander family and townspeople who’ve been knocked down again and again but keep getting up. And this time they have the unlikeliest help.
The lone American, Josh Hartnett, headlines the series opposite Mackenzie Davis and a rich ensemble cast, playing Penney family patriarch Calvin. A former fisherman and widowed father of three grown children, two of whom live off the island, he ekes out a living fishing for castoff icebergs from Greenland to sell to the local vodka distillery and renting out a room in his modest house as an AirBnB, run by his youngest son, Wade (Charlie Heaton).
When his latest haul doesn’t pass muster for purity, he shares it with the Dr. Fonda Howander (Davis), who’s housed at the marine biology research center up the road. While she’s digging into that, a giant new iceberg shows up in the harbor to tantalize the local fortune hunters, and it’s soon apparent that it didn’t show up alone.
Once fish farms, fishermen, and tourists start to disappear from the water and Wade has a terrifying encounter, the stakes are upped considerably to find out what exactly is stalking the harbor. The answer is something unexpected, a primal and ancient creature with whom Calvin has a history, and their previous encounter left him with a childhood trauma that shaped and still haunts him.
The timing of the return just so happens to coincide with a homecoming weekend for former residents, including Calvin’s older children, son Jay (Rohan Campbell) and daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes), who has her Montreal boyfriend Noah (Revival’s Kaleb Horn) in tow. The Penney clan is rounded out by Calvin’s sister Ruth (Willow Kean), the local harbormaster who is a fellow survivor but hasn’t let their earlier tragedy define her.
The additional wrinkle is that the local big bad, mega-million-dollar business Crocker Industries is trying to coax the town’s residents to relocate by offering them a buyout—the second such offer for the elder Penneys, who respond at opposite ends of the spectrum to the idea of cutting a runner for cash.
So, we have a horror story, a family story, a trauma story, and an adventure story all thrown together and stirred. It’s a very good time, and no two episodes are tonally alike, which I loved. The seaside location will draw obvious comparisons to Apple’s juggernaut Widow’s Bay, but this isn’t that at all. And that’s a good thing.
It is instead a kindred cousin to my other Canadian spooky shows, SurrealEstate, which shared the Newfoundland filming location for the first two seasons, From, and Revival. The story is told straight, without satire, but there are moments of levity where the only pragmatic response is to find the humor in the fantastical that doesn’t make any sense, but here it is anyway. And there are a few edgy bits where the Penneys face off with new arrivals and old returnees who each pose more of a danger than what’s in the water.
I very much enjoyed it, inhaling all six episodes in two days. That’s not at all surprising when you consider the source. Series creator Jesse McKeown is an alumni of three series from Chris Haddock, who y’all know is my #CdnTV North Star. He’s joined by Perry Chafe, who was a creator on Republic of Doyle, Son of a Critch, and the current CBC hit Saint-Pierre, which desperately needs a US outlet.
McKeown and Chafe share writing duties with writing producer Karen Walton, who gave us the definitive Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps, and the show’s writer’s room assistant, Natty Zavitz, who co-wrote the finale with McKeown. I love that.
The directing team includes the iconic Helen Shaver (who as an actress was a series regular on another fun Canadian horror nugget, Poltergeist: The Legacy, back in the day), Jamie Childs (Sandman and His Dark Materials), and Stephen Dunn (Queer as Folk). The production team does a fantastic job capturing the beauty and the barrenness of the locations and the people who call it home.
It’s taken a decade to finally get Hartnett back in a series after the debacle of the final season of Penny Dreadful. He’s excellent here, holding his own against the locals with a learned Newfoundlander accent and playing a man for whom trauma has defined his whole life, yet he still hangs on to hope. Davis, who I adore back to Station Eleven, is great as a brilliant woman who trained her entire professional life for the opportunity that presents itself and then has to navigate all the scenarios while trying to keep everyone safe when the town devolves into chaos.
Heaton, Stokes, and Campbell are very good, with Heaton playing the now-fracturing fragility of the son Calvin mistakenly thought he had to shelter and Stokes and Campbell as the ones who moved on to their own lives and now question those life choices. Kean is new to me and I liked her a lot. Ruth and Calvin emerged from the same flames and it’s clear she became the adult while he grew up but never completely got right about what they survived.
The whole ensemble is aces. Look for Natasha Henstridge as a visiting artist who befriends the locals and Alexander Karim and David Wenham as two outsiders who arrive with an agenda. There are also a few neat Newfoundland-native guest appearances I will not spoil.
Below premieres around the world on Netflix Thursday morning, October 8th, at 3:01 am ET. Here’s a sneak peek.
Photos and video courtesy of Netflix.
Netflix Has Us at Below
