WATERLOGGED

‘Below’ Is Netflix‘s Shallow Attempt to Recreate ‘Jaws’

A small Newfoundland town is terrorized by a sea creature in Netflix’s “Below.”

There’s something under the water in Below, but unfortunately, there’s nothing beneath this Netflix miniseries’ monster-movie surface.

A six-episode saga about a Newfoundland town beset by a man-eating aquatic menace, Netflix’s quirky genre thriller (streaming Oct. 9) is a cornucopia of ridiculousness, be it a fiend whose behavior makes less sense with each subsequent action, a story that appears to have been hastily sketched on a cocktail napkin, or actors speaking in an overcooked Canadian-Irish accent that’s absurd to the point of distraction. No matter Josh Hartnett’s hearty performance, it’s a water-thin washout that starts strong, then sinks like a stone.

In 1986, a family tows their home across frigid waters to Snooks Arm, an island where the predatory Crocker clan has forced them to relocate. Their trip goes wrong when an ancient goliath attacks the floating house, and 10-year-old Calvin, to save them all, is forced to cut their dinghy free—dooming his father.

Forty years later, Calvin (Hartnett) is an ice fisherman scraping by and fighting plans to resettle the community elsewhere. The past weighs heavily on the single father, and that extends to his refusal, out of overprotectiveness, to let his youngest son Wade (Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton) join him on the water.

Wade’s sister Ruth (Willow Kean) is the local harbormaster, and his other two children soon visit him. Mary (Ruby Stokes) lives in Montreal and has brought her boyfriend Noah (Kaleb Horn), and Jay (Rohan Campbell) earns a living working on a rig. Both are happy to see their dad but less than interested in moving back to Snooks Arm to help him fulfill his dream of opening a brewery.

Such concerns prove secondary, however, after Calvin hauls in a piece of ice and discovers that it stinks to high heaven. Ocean scientist Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) deduces the stench is because it’s actually a frozen mucus membrane with a seemingly toxic excretion.

Creator and showrunner Jesse McKeown sets things in motion tantalizingly, slathering on the idiosyncratic color and embracing genre archetypes. At the same time, he hints at calamity on the horizon courtesy of a beast that, after felling a nearby Portuguese ship, begins frequenting the harbor. So too does a giant iceberg, and for a community predicated on selling ice (to Crocker’s vodka-distilling outfit), it looks like a potential goldmine.

Eager to do more than tend house, Wade endeavors to make a fortune with it. Alas, his ambition leads to a horrifying death, and a separate attack on a couple of tourists reveals to Calvin and Fonda the nature of their problem: a giant prehistoric squid.

Jaws, Aliens, and various other creature features are the template for Below, along with a not-inconsiderable dash of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, and the series initially provides a captivating peek at a corner of the world that’s rarely depicted on-screen. McKeown teases full looks at his monster à la Steven Spielberg and his iconic shark, and when he does deliver glimpses, they’re suitably striking. Unfortunately, he can’t generate legitimate suspense; his set pieces are predictable and unexceptional, devoid of either rip-roaring vigor or gnarly nastiness.

Without terror, what’s left in Below is its characters, and they’re a shallow bunch. Those interested in knowing anything substantial about Ruth, Mary, Noah, or the rest are in for a mammoth disappointment. Even Jay’s ongoing difficulties with a pair of hoodlums to whom he owes money is hackneyed and barely developed.

The cast’s performances therefore rest more or less completely on the extravagance of their accents, and extravagant they are, so thick and silly that they’re just about the sole thing one can think about every time they open their mouths. Whereas Newfoundland native Natasha Henstridge (as Jay’s May-December love interest Jan) boasts merely a faint brogue, everyone else in Below sounds like they’re in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Hartnett fares best in Below, thanks to a character that has more than one distinguishing feature; Davis, by comparison, makes an outright cartoonish impression as a researcher with no backstory or notable traits. Nonetheless, he remains an ordinary sort of tormented fight-the-power hero, and such blandness also plagues the show’s points about climate change—you see, the squid’s appearance may be due to the warming and deteriorating ice shelf—and corporate villainy.

Despite working with six episodes, McKeown doesn’t flesh out any aspect of his tale, which is doubly frustrating since he seems only half-heartedly interested in delivering gruesome B-movie excitement.

The further it drifts from its premiere, the more Below loses its bearings, and in its concluding two episodes, its plot takes so many nonsensical turns that any semblance of plausibility—even for a series about a giant killer cephalopod—is shattered. It’s tough to fathom how a script supervisor gave some of these twists the thumbs up. Yet shoddiness is endemic, peaking with a sequence that begins with Hartnett clutching one injured arm and then, during a few shots, erroneously grabbing the other.

Its revelations are similarly weak, with McKeown falling back on the hoariest of clichés, none worse than the idea that the actual baddie plaguing Snooks Arm may not be the murderous squid but, rather, an old rich white man whose designs for the enclave are mustache-twirling evil.

At the risk of repeating a tired refrain, Below would have been better off as a 100-minute film that emphasized chaos and carnage, since at this length it manages to flop in both the drama and horror departments.

Due to its chief shortcomings, the show’s ho-hum finale is almost beside the point. Still, it’s underwhelming, with characters pulling off feats that defy logic (given their logistical circumstances) and doing so with laughable ease. It’s as if McKeown realized that he’d squandered much of his runtime and had to hastily wrap things up, and what he devises is somehow worse than everything that preceded it.

Concluding on an apparent cliffhanger that’s vague in the least enticing manner possible—all while ignoring the more natural cliffhanger that’s sitting right there, waiting to be deployed—Below is a cheesy-fun premise undone by slipshod execution. It belongs in Davy Jones’ locker, although the forgotten corners of the Netflix archive will have to suffice.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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