Below Review 2026 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Calvin goes fishing with his father. They head to their house by the sea, but when his father enters the house, a giant squid drags the entire building underwater. Forty years later, Calvin has two sons and a daughter, and the squid is back.
The first three episodes are boring. We spend our time watching the lives of fishermen and a boy who loses his father to a giant squid-like creature. Then the story jumps forty years ahead and the boy has grown into the man played by Josh Hartnett, whom we know from Lucky Number Slevin. For four decades, nobody seems to have heard anything about the squid. Then suddenly it returns, just when the story needs a gigantic villain. Apparently, climate change is responsible for its appearance. But if climate change brought the creature back, why was it already there forty years ago? The series doesn’t make that particularly clear.
At least every episode ends with a hook designed to make you want to watch the next one. The first episode gives us 47 minutes of boredom before ending with a man being cut in half. The second ends with some kind of terrifying water witch. And in the third episode, this water witch has sex with Slevin’s son, who was attacked by a squid offscreen and now has a perfectly oval-shaped squid mark on his back. Subtlety clearly wasn’t high on the writers’ list of priorities.
The final three episodes reveal that the squid isn’t actually evil at all. The real villain is a wealthy man who wants the island for its resources. It feels like a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump wanting Greenland for its natural resources, while presenting it as a strategic location for defence against Russia. The irony of Trump and Putin being friendly makes that comparison even more interesting.
But the whole idea that the squid is friendly left me scratching my head. It makes the horrific murders we have witnessed feel like unfortunate accidents caused by human mistakes. There is an island where the squid has gathered the people it caught and these people apparently know that the creature is friendly. When they go fishing, it even helps them. Yet not one of them thinks of returning to the mainland to tell their families and friends that the supposedly terrifying monster isn’t actually a threat. Seriously? Even at the end, neither Caleb nor his son Wade seems to think of returning to the island to bring back the girl Wade has fallen in love with.
The series spends most of its time making you believe there is some enormous threat lurking beneath the water. Then, when the truth finally comes out, the monster isn’t the real monster after all. It’s a rich human being who wants to exploit the island. I understand the message, but we have seen this story so many times before.
Below starts by promising a terrifying creature and ends up giving us a familiar story about human greed. Unfortunately, the twist does not make the journey worthwhile. After three rather dull episodes, I was hoping for something more satisfying than discovering that the monster wasn’t really the monster.
