Canada has plenty of mythology, landscapes and communities capable of inspiring great genre storytelling. Below understands that we don’t need to look anywhere else.
Created by Jesse McKeown, this wonderfully atmospheric Newfoundland-set series takes the familiar ingredients of aquatic horror, a remote coastal community, disappearing people, something terrifying beneath the water, and builds something unmistakably Canadian around them.
Josh Hartnett leads an outstanding ensemble as Calvin Penney, a fisherman attempting to preserve a way of life that is disappearing around him. Declining fish stocks have already forced Calvin to adapt, while a government resettlement proposal asks the community an even more existential question: how much can disappear before home stops being home?
Then something starts moving beneath the water.
What makes Below so compelling is the balance between those two threats. The supernatural horror works because the human stakes already matter. Newfoundland’s ocean is simultaneously livelihood, history, identity and danger, allowing McKeown to turn the landscape itself into an essential character.
Hartnett brings exactly the weathered gravitas Calvin requires, while Mackenzie Davis, Charlie Heaton, Ruby Stokes and Rohan Campbell help create a family that feels complicated enough to exist beyond the mechanics of a monster story. The warmth and humour of the community become essential counterweights to the increasingly ominous mystery.
Visually, Below is spectacular. The immense Atlantic landscape provides production value no soundstage could replicate, while the cold blues, fog, icebergs and seemingly endless ocean create an atmosphere that feels both beautiful and deeply threatening.
But its greatest achievement is understanding that Canadian identity can provide fertile ground for ambitious genre storytelling.
Below may contain monsters in the Atlantic, but its real power comes from something much closer to shore: the terrifying possibility of losing your home, your history and the way of life that connected generations before you.
