Josh Hartnett’s new Netflix thriller is dredging up real Newfoundland trauma.
The six-episode series “Below,” which premiered last week, drops the “Pearl” actor, 46, into a dying coastal town where a sea monster lurks beneath the waves. But the creature is the least grounded element in a show built on government-forced relocation, collapsed fisheries, and the stubborn families who refused to leave.
Creator Jesse McKeown, a Newfoundland native, mined his home’s documented history for the supernatural drama. He said that he always wanted to make something “big” and “strange” in the province, “something that taps into the terrifying ruggedness and isolation of the place.”
That isolation drives the opening scene: a family towing their entire house across open water. The image comes straight from the 1950s-to-1970s resettlement programs, when Ottawa paid isolated Newfoundlanders to abandon their outport communities for larger centers. Those who agreed often floated their homes to new harbors rather than start from scratch.
“So many families now are directly affected by resettlement,” McKeown told the Canadian Press. “If you spend any time there, or if you grew up there, that image of the house floating on the ocean is a key image.”
Resettlement never fully ended. Community-led relocation votes still happen in the region, and “Below” folds this ongoing tension into its plot: Hartnett’s Calvin Penney watches his neighbors debate a cash offer to abandon their town while something ancient stirs in the water.
The economic pressure on Calvin’s fictional community also carries historical weight. The town survives on commercial fishing and iceberg harvesting, mirroring the real 1992 cod moratorium that Canada imposed on July 2 of that year. Decades of overfishing had collapsed northern cod stocks to roughly one percent of their peak, and Ottawa’s ban put nearly 30,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians out of work. Observers called it the largest mass layoff in Canadian history, and it effectively ended centuries of cod fishing tradition.
Netflix has kept the creature’s exact nature under wraps, leaving marine researcher Fonda Howander, played by Mackenzie Davis, to puzzle out whether a giant squid or deeper force haunts the coastline. Early reviews have noted the squid theory, tying it to longstanding sea serpent legends off Newfoundland’s shores.
Whether the monster serves as metaphor for environmental collapse and cultural erasure, or simply provides genre thrills, McKeown’s script keeps one foot in verifiable crisis. Hartnett’s character fights to protect both his family and a vanishing way of life, a struggle that echoes the real holdouts who refused resettlement offers or tried to sustain themselves after the cod stocks crashed.
All six episodes of “Below” are now streaming on Netflix.