Josh Hartnett is chewing the scenery in Netflix's massive new horror-thriller
Below looks like a whole heap of fun
I'm a big fan of the career revival that Josh Hartnett has had in the last few years, one that felt like it really started with M. Night Shyamalan's film Trap in 2024. I watched that movie on a plane and it felt like the perfect choice for the circumstances, with Hartnett very clearly having oodles of fun in the lead role.
Now he's anchoring a new limited series for Netflix, and it looks like almost as interesting a choice once again. Below looks like a gothic horror story, or at the very least, a thriller, and Hartnett is in the lead as a father with a complex trauma buried in his past – one that comes to the surface when a mysterious iceberg floats up next to his fishing town.
It looks like Hartnett's character, Calvin, had something extremely weird happen to him as a teenager – his father disappeared inside an odd floating house, then was taken down into the depths. Now, as an adult, he's carved out a decent enough life for himself, fishing and keeping himself to himself.
When a couple of his kids come back for a visit, he's pleased to see them, but it looks like he'll start to get fairly tied up in anxiety when weird phenomena start to plague the town. We don't get a proper look at what might be lurking below the placid surface of the sea they live by, but it sure doesn't seem normal – and that's before the massive iceberg rocks up out of nowhere.
I don't often have this opinion, but for a full trailer from Netflix I actually think this one is really well-judged. It gets you interested in what's going to happen to the town, and just what the nature of the disturbances could really be, but manages to resist the temptation to show us too much. We get a vibe check, basically, but don't get too much spoiled for us.
With the series dropping in full on 8 October, there's still probably some time left for Netflix to reverse course and show us more than we want, but if you're in the mood for something a little eery this could be a perfect one to queue up. It might be Netflix's answer to Widow's Bay on Apple TV, frankly.
