Every write-up of “Below” so far has called it a sea creature show, and the trailer Netflix put out on 10 September quietly disagrees. Watch what the dialogue actually points at. “The iceberg is not your friend.” “Too dangerous to go anywhere near it.” “There’s something wrong with that ice.” Nobody in this trailer says the word monster. They keep saying ice, and the show is called “Below,” which is where roughly nine tenths of an iceberg lives.
“Below” is a six episode limited series, Canadian, created and written by Jesse McKeown, and it had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September before it reaches Netflix on 8 October. Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) is a fisherman in a remote Newfoundland town, and the whole thing was shot on location around St. John’s. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Below” trailer, including what happens to the house, what the sonar picks up, and the line the trailer chooses to end on.
Nobody in this trailer says the word monster. They keep saying ice, and the show is called “Below,” which is where roughly nine tenths of an iceberg lives.”
It opens on an interrogation rather than a jump scare, which is a decent sign. “Right before the accident,” somebody says to Calvin, “you saw something in the water.” A pause, and then: “and what was it?” The trailer does not let him answer. Instead it cuts to the accident, and the accident is a house. An actual timber house, sliding off the land into the sea and going under in a wall of white water while somebody screams “oh my God” and a second voice screams “Dad.” It is a genuinely alarming image, partly because the scale is wrong: horror usually takes a person, and this takes a building.
From there the trailer does something most monster shows would not spend a full thirty seconds on. It introduces the family. “Your brother and sister are coming in from the mainland,” Calvin is told, and then, with the specific weariness of a man who knows how this goes, “let’s try to have ourselves a nice family visit.” What follows is a homecoming: hugs on a wet road, a bar, and then a screech-in, the Newfoundland initiation where a newcomer kisses a cod. Somebody holds the fish up. “Give it a kiss.” Then, delightedly: “you’re a Newfoundlander now.”
That detail is doing more work than it looks. This is a cast of Penneys: Calvin, plus Wade (Charlie Heaton), Jay (Rohan Campbell), Mary (Ruby Stokes) and Ruth (Willow Kean). Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) is a marine researcher in from away, and Natasha Henstridge and Mary Walsh fill out the town. So the outsider getting the cod pressed to her mouth is not colour, it is the show drawing its only real border: people from here, and people from away. A monster story set in a place with a word for that distinction is going to be about the distinction. Heaton is the name most likely to pull a “Stranger Things” audience across, and it is pointed casting: he has spent a decade on a show about a small town refusing to say out loud what is happening to it. Here he arrives from the mainland into a town that already knows.
Then the ice arrives, and it is the best shot in the trailer. An iceberg the size of a cathedral sitting inside a green Newfoundland cove, small fishing boats puttering around its base like they are visiting. It looks like a postcard until you notice everyone is telling everyone else to stay away from it. “The iceberg is not your friend.” “Get back.” The show’s own poster, the one carrying the TIFF selection laurel, puts a house inside the iceberg, half swallowed, with a man rowing towards it. Given what happens to the house in the trailer’s opening seconds, that is not a metaphor anyone should be relaxed about.
The back half is escalation and it is mostly withheld. A sonar screen with a shape on it that is much too large. An aerial of a fishing boat with a wake running at it from off frame, arriving fast, which is the oldest trick in this genre and still works. Something pale under a hull, lit from a torch. A man says “I spent my whole life on the water. I thought I understood it,” which is the thesis. Another says “this town is not in its right mind,” which is the promise that the people will crack before the creature does. And the trailer ends on a warning rather than a reveal: “stay away from the water, or the rest of us are gonna be next.” We never get a clean look at whatever it is, and that restraint is the most encouraging thing here.
It is also, unusually for a second look at a show, mostly new. Netflix put out a teaser on 28 July, and running the two cuts against each other frame by frame, roughly half of this one is footage that was not in that teaser at all, with only about a quarter of it confidently repeating. Most of what does repeat is a single shot: a structure sitting out in thick fog with a small boat approaching it, which both cuts clearly regard as the image that sells the show. That is a lot of fresh material for a series still three weeks from release, and it suggests Netflix is not rationing what it has.
The production details support the serious reading rather than the schlocky one. Netflix ordered it in February 2025 with McKeown as creator, writer and showrunner, and the episodes are split between Jamie Child, Helen Shaver and Stephen Dunn. Six episodes is a real limited series rather than an open-ended monster-of-the-week, which means someone has to answer the question at the end. Netflix’s own logline says Calvin is fighting to protect “his family, his community, and his vanishing way of life,” and that third item is the one carrying the weight. This is a fishing town. The way of life was already vanishing before anything showed up in the water.
The risk is obvious enough to name. A creature story that keeps its creature offscreen for two minutes of trailer is either building dread properly or hiding something it cannot afford to show, and six hours is a long time to keep that up before the reveal has to land. Hartnett has built a late-career run out of exactly this register, the decent man losing his grip, and the TIFF berth suggests Netflix thinks it has a prestige piece rather than a Saturday night creature feature. On the evidence of the trailer they are probably right. Whether that is what people press play for on 8 October is a different question.
What Do You Think? Is the thing in “Below” actually in the iceberg, or is the ice a delivery mechanism for something that has been down there a lot longer? Does a six episode limited series owe you a full look at its monster, or is the restraint in this trailer the whole appeal? And after the house goes into the water in the opening seconds, is there any version of this where the town survives intact?
See you on the next binge!
