Over the last year, Netflix has admitted it has started to dumb down scripts for “second screen viewers” (people who cannot be bothered enough to stop scrolling for the fourty-odd minutes it takes to watch a TV episode). Historically, media that has featured Newfoundland has also dumbed our culture and people down, reducing us to flat stereotypes of outport bumpkins permanently stuck in the 1960s. Suffice to say, my expectations heading into Below, Netflix’s new horror miniseries set in rural Newfoundland, were almost abysmal. However, after seeing the series’ first two episodes, the show just slightly surpassed my expectations: a fine-enough horror drama which falls just short of authenticity. 

Below follows the Penney family, ice catchers in Snook’s Arm, a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland’s Baie Verte peninsula. We follow Calvin (Josh Harnett), the family patriarch who is haunted by witnessing the death of his own father as a child, his deadbeat son Wade (Charlie Heaton), and his other children who are returning to Snook’s Arm for the “Come Home Year” festival. Amid a heated debate on the permanent resettling of Snook’s Arm, mysterious disappearances and biological oddities threaten the community.

This premise is interesting enough, once you account for some glaring historical inaccuracies. The most egregious of these issues is that the framing trauma of the plot — the death of Calvin’s father while attempting to drag their house across the ocean as part of a government-enforced resettlement program — is supposed to have happened in the mid-1980s. However, the formal sweeping resettlement program where residents had to haul their houses across the sea ended in the late 1970s. While some communities continue to be “resettled,” the way this has happened since the 1970s is incredibly different from what the show describes. Normally, I am not such a stickler for accuracy in film, however, Below bills itself as an authentic look at Newfoundland’s culture and history — a topic of which mainlanders have already very little knowledge. It also doesn’t evade the classic “stupid Newfie” stereotype, employing a cast of characters filled with drunks, unemployed people, and organized crime. 

The accent work in the show also leaves something to be desired. The cast clearly put a lot of work into crafting an “authentic” Newfoundland accent, however, it comes at the cost of a lot of the show’s overly expository dialogue that often gets garbled out as the cast loses their fight against the dialect. We all don’t have “the accent,” and I see it as a lack of oversight from the crew that certain actors who clearly have difficulty with the dialect were not coached to just speak with a standard North American accent. 

Visually, Below is like any other streaming slop: plain, mostly static shots of characters describing exactly what they are doing and why. I was somewhat disappointed with this as I think the landscape of Newfoundland is one of the island’s greatest features, and I was saddened that the show did not take advantage of its gorgeous shooting spaces on the Avalon Peninsula (I should be completely transparent here: I grew up in St. John’s, and my family is from the Conception Bay area where the show was filmed). Often, the way visual space is used in the show is disorganized, confusing, and does not create a clear spatial diegesis of the world in which the show takes place. For example, we are led to believe that Snook’s Arm is so incredibly rural that it is under threat of resettlement, yet Calvin is somehow able to constantly drive to a high-tech oceanography institute on a whim. The show also makes sure that whenever there is a space — a bar, the wharfs in the harbour, etc., — on screen, those spaces are packed with people, which once again would go against the framing device of Snook’s Arm’s isolation. 

I cannot speak much to the narrative of the series; as of now I have only seen the first two episodes at TIFF, with the latter half of the show to be released later this fall. However, what I did see was not particularly striking. The show gives the viewer too much information to make the mystery completely irrelevant, but also keeps trying to hint at larger mysteries which do not seem well thought out or coherent. Perhaps these plots will be synthesized in later episodes of the show, but if I were watching this at home I probably would not have any interest in going past the first episode.

While I mostly did not enjoy the beginning of Below, I do believe the show did some things well. The special effects and gore, for example, are incredibly well done — I believe the show used a mixture of practical and digital effects — and added some good scares to what would otherwise be a pretty uninteresting supernatural horror plot. Barring the accent work, the acting in the show is quite good across the board, with Charlie Heaton’s performance as Wade being the strongest in my view. The show was also made with a clear desire for local authenticity from the showrunners, and while I believe that it does not fully realize that goal, it does get in some good jokes along the way. For example, there are two mainlander tourist characters who rent out Calvin’s house as a bed and breakfast, which are a pretty good satire to me of the type of tourist who comes to rural Newfoundland in search of some more “naturally connected” culture away from the big cities. However, I might beg to argue that due to this show’s portrayal of Newfoundland culture, it might be made for those exact tourists it wants to be satirizing. 

I do not think Below really works as both a piece of genre television or as the celebration of Newfoundland culture it claims itself to be. But maybe if I was scrolling reels on my phone — as Netflix intended — this show would appear as smart as it clearly wants to be.