Below: A Moody Sea-Monster Thriller with a Big Family Heart
Kaiya Shunyata ranks the six-episode series among the year’s best, admiring how it weaves a creature feature into a family drama set in Snook’s Arm, a Newfoundland fishing town being pushed to relocate for a second time. Josh Hartnett’s fisherman Calvin, still scarred by his father’s drowning, anchors it, and Charlie Heaton is every bit his equal.
She values that the show builds dread without leaning on cheap jump scares, and singles out William Baldy’s moody photography and a cramped, red-lit submarine sequence. She also reads it as a timely story about wealthy outsiders squeezing rural communities, a theme she feels it tackles with real bite. Kaiya Shunyata, RogerEbert.com
Lauren Thoman finds it uneven but very bingeable, a good fit for anyone who enjoys monster movies, family sagas or small-town eco-thrillers. She credits Hartnett, Heaton, Ruby Stokes and Rohan Campbell with making the Penney family feel like people with shared history, and says the town, with its local dialect and grimy harbor, feels truly lived in.
Her gripe is that six episodes can’t hold everything the writers attempt: romances, debts and a lost engagement ring clutter the plot, the tone lurches at the midpoint, and one near-bottle episode explains the island’s oddities too tidily. Still, she found the character-driven finale largely rewarding. Lauren Thoman, TheWrap
Ashley Hurst lands in the middle, warning that real scares are scarce and that viewers expecting the cosmic, Lovecraftian terror teased in the marketing will come away short-changed. The submarine showdown is the one stretch she found truly gripping, and she points pure monster fans toward Under Paris instead.
What she does admire is the human story, with Calvin torn between family, neighbors and conscience in a way that carries weight without turning soapy. She also enjoys the rugged scenery, the folklore-rooted take on a giant squid and the poisoned-water angle, and gives credit to a finale that tries, imperfectly, to win sympathy for its creature. Ashley Hurst, What’s on Netflix
The consensus: Critics agree that Josh Hartnett, the vivid Newfoundland setting and the family drama at its core are the show’s real strengths, while they differ on how much its crowded plot and sparse scares hold it back. The overall verdict is positive: a moody, character-first monster series that rewards patience more than it delivers jolts.
