Below Review

Below is a six-episode Netflix limited series created and run by Jesse McKeown, a writer on The Umbrella Academy, and shot mostly in Brigus South, Newfoundland and Labrador. Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, an iceberg-harvesting fisherman in the outport of Snook's Arm who has never got over his father's death decades ago, and Mackenzie Davis is Fonda Howander, a scientist at the local ocean research centre who joins him when something in the water starts taking the town apart.

Charlie Heaton, Rohan Campbell and Ruby Stokes play his children and Willow Kean his sister, the harbourmaster, and Jamie Childs, Helen Shaver and Stephen Dunn each direct two episodes. All six arrived on October 8, 2026 after a Toronto premiere, and within days it topped Netflix's charts, a record audience for a Canadian Netflix title.

The reviews were good: 87 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes from 45 critics and 70 on Metacritic. The consensus admits it leans on familiar creature feature tropes but says it uses its limited time wisely and leaves viewers thoroughly thrilled. Dread Central found it steeped in mood, with real shocks, and the coastline and the grey North Atlantic do as much for the dread as the monster. The loudest dissent was about Hartnett's Newfoundland accent, which one review called among the worst its writer had heard, and the dialogue between the scares is serviceable at best.

The setting and its photography earn cinematography an A. The story is a tight, well paced B, the cast a B around an accent that will divide people, the dialogue a C, and it is a B.