(courtesy IMDb (c) Netflix)
Is there anything even remotely connecting, in narrative spirit at least, the wild Atlantic shores of Newfoundland and the startlingly beautifully and empty desert landscapes of Arizona?
You may not think so, but if you’ve watched both The Boroughs and Below on Netflix, you may have noticed that the two share a certain amount of narrative DNA, wherein a monster, present in both stories and scary as hell at the start of the story suddenly becomes ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- something else entirely by the end.
Both start out almost as creature features and you could be forgiven for thinking that the monster is evil, the people are all good and the shows will both end with humanity standing victorious over some sort over some of now vanquished monstrously scary biological entity.
But, and again ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- it turns out, as is so often the case in these types of horror stories, that it is the human beings, or some of them at least, wrapped up in greed and lust for all kinds of things that can only be achieved if others lose out in some way who pose the biggest and most enduring threat of all.
In Below, set in the failing coastal village of Snook’s Arm in Newfoundland in Canada, it’s the humans who looks like the victims for much of the first half of the show’s eight-episode run; something big and scary, big enough to capture and ingest a huge bull moose, is roaming the waters around the coastline, eating all the fish, anyone stupid to be in the water or too near the shore, and causing people who eat the dirty ice in the giant iceberg that’s bobbed into the harbour to go delirious and water-crazed as some sort of psychotropic infection takes hold.
It’s all very mysterious, very scary and most of the first four episodes features people being stalked by the creature which turns out to be a very ancient ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- cephalopod aka squid/octopus which is ‘t all that enamoured of the people who keep invading its domain.
With a faint whiff of Jaws and the Creature From the Black Lagoon and a host of other shows hanging about it, not to mention the ammonia that that whiffs up from anything the creature has touched or which is drawn from it, Below is all kinds of balmy, silly, over-the-top creature feature fun.
But and here’s the fun part; the show created by Jesse McKeown, who also served as the showrunner, is also that rare thing, a show which somehow manages to be heartfelt, though let’s not get carried away it’s hardly Oscar-worthy dramatic material, in amongst all the other the top pseudo scientific thrills and cares.
At the core of Below sits the Penney family, and specifically Calvin (Josh Hartnett), who have lived in Snook’s Arms for four decades after they were forcibly resettled from their original small island home under a provincial scheme to aggregate people into bigger and bigger urban centres.
Traumatic as that move was for Calvin and his older sister Ruth (Willow Kean) who serves as the town’s harbourmaster, it pales into insignificance against the death of Calvin’s father during the trip to Snook’s Arm in 1986 when their home, on a massive barge, sank in what appeared to be a tragic sort of accident.
It was of course nothing of the kind, and it’s flagged with all the subtlety of neon lit signs in a red light district of town that something attacked the house, the barge and nearly took down Calvin, his sister and his mother with it.
The trauma of losing his dad and his then home in one fell narratively cruel swoop has never left Calvin and forty years later with three years of his own – daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes) who’s studying at university in Montreal where’s snagged herself a mainlander boyfriend called Noah (Kaleb Horn), sons Jay (Rohan Campbell) who working as a rig operator in Alberta, and Wade (Charlie Heaton) who has never left home and is, well hyper odd – he remains trapped way back when.
The Penneys sit at the heart of what is an outrageously outsized and overdone story, giving it real humanity and emotional groundedness, helped along by the fact that the scientist of the story (there always has been to be a scientist who knows things; just as there’s evil corporate people and blinked military people, both of which Below, never afraid of a metric of well-used tropes and cliches, has in spades) Dr Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) might be the one to heal Calvin’s long-broken heart.
If this all sounds like a lot of bunkum and silliness wedged into a story which is part creature feature, part expose of corporate greed and long-played conspiracy, part family drama and part romcom, with a dash of plague movie and end of the world pandemic story thrown in for good measure, then you’d be right because it very much is all that and more.
And yet for all its ridiculousness and an ever-present sense you’ve seen it all before, Below is a lot of emotionally intense, scary, slushy fun, the sort of story which vanishes like morning mist after episode eight has run its grand finale course but which is massively entertaining while its spinning its far-fetched yarn.
Yes, there are gaps in the story big enough to swim a giant GIANT squid through – such as why does the cephalopod destroy the Penney’s house then vanish for forty years and why does it lay its eggs in an iceberg (or a glacier that the iceberg broke off from) – and true it all goes very dark and wacky at times (there’s a cult of crazy islander people who worship the creature and are an entire sandwich shop short of a picnic) and strings things out perhaps a little too long, but Below delivers on the pulpy scares and the meaningful melodramatic drama, keeping you happily guessing until the big reveal and the climatic final act where GOOD is done and EVIL is seen off (and not the monstrous kind).
It’s perfect Halloween fare that manages to feel like something with a heart and a soul and while it won’t be winning any awards soon, it’s pretty much what the undead doctor ordered if you’re looking for scarily escapist fare this Halloween season.
Below streams on Netflix.