Shawn Doyle – Through the Shattered Lens

“I can’t just roll over, I need to see this thing through.” — Calvin Penney

The scariest thing in Netflix’s Below might be the possibility that the place you call home no longer has a future. Sure, there’s a monster lurking offshore, and the series isn’t shy about putting its characters through some nasty situations. But beneath the creature-feature setup is a more personal story about people struggling to recognize when holding on becomes its own kind of danger. Created by Jesse McKeown, this six-episode series mixes coastal horror, family baggage, and small-town stubbornness into something engaging, even when its storytelling gets a little tangled. It works best when those elements feel like different parts of the same problem.

Set in the Newfoundland community of Snook’s Arm, Below follows Calvin Penney, a widower played by Josh Hartnett whose attachment to the town runs deep. A childhood tragedy involving relocation and the death of his father has left him with understandable reasons to distrust the idea of starting over. Now he makes ends meet alongside his son Wade, harvesting iceberg ice and renting out a room. With his other children coming home for a visit, there’s an opportunity for the family to reconnect. Naturally, this being a monster series, the reunion comes with some unpleasant complications waiting in the water.

That setup gives the show something more substantial than the usual group of strangers stumbling into danger. Calvin already has things to lose before the creature becomes a threat, and not all of them can be protected by simply surviving. His family’s relationship with Snook’s Arm isn’t necessarily the same as his own, which creates tension without requiring anyone to behave like an obvious villain. For Calvin, leaving means surrendering something essential. For others, staying might mean sacrificing a chance at a different life. The monster doesn’t create those disagreements so much as make them impossible to keep putting off.

Hartnett gives the series a reliable emotional anchor. Calvin is warm enough to make his devotion appealing, but he’s also capable of turning that devotion into a burden for everyone around him. Hartnett understands that balance, playing him as someone whose good intentions don’t automatically make his decisions reasonable. You can sympathize with his fear of losing another home while still wanting him to listen when someone challenges him. His Newfoundland accent occasionally becomes a distraction, but the performance underneath it feels grounded. Calvin’s grief matters because it influences how he behaves, not just because the script tells us he has a painful past.

Charlie Heaton adds a useful edge as Wade, whose relationship with his father carries both affection and frustration. Their shared routine suggests closeness, but it also raises questions about how much room either has to move forward. The family material is strongest when it lets those mixed feelings sit without immediately explaining them away. Mackenzie Davis brings a different energy as marine researcher Fonda Howander, giving the mystery an investigative thread beyond Calvin’s personal concerns. She helps connect the disturbing events to something the characters can begin to understand, while the family drama keeps the consequences from becoming purely theoretical.

Snook’s Arm itself is one of the show’s biggest assets. The coastal scenery has an appealing harshness, making it easy to understand both why someone would love living there and why someone else would want out. The town feels isolated before the horror really gets going, and that isolation becomes more oppressive as familiar surroundings turn threatening. There’s a difference between being somewhere quiet and realizing help might be a long way off. Below makes good use of that distinction. Its setting isn’t just attractive background scenery; it shapes the characters’ options and gives their reluctance to leave a believable emotional foundation.

The horror is especially effective when it grows out of ordinary details becoming wrong. Foul-smelling ice, disappearances, and unsettling changes create the sense that something has worked its way into the community before anyone understands its scale. The ocean has always been unpredictable, but now that uncertainty feels actively hostile. Mark Korven’s score helps sustain the unease, while the more grisly material supplies the creature-feature payoff. When the water becomes dangerous, it doesn’t just interrupt the characters’ plans. It undermines the relationship that makes the town possible. Later, the creature side of the story takes some interesting turns that complicate the initial setup without abandoning its sense of danger.

That’s why resettlement is such an effective idea to build the drama around. Residents are considering whether to accept money to leave, and the series gives that decision emotional weight rather than treating it as a simple question of common sense. Calvin’s resistance comes from experience, but experience can also trap someone in an old way of understanding a new crisis. The ecological themes fit naturally alongside that conflict. This is a story about a community facing the possibility that its surroundings can no longer support the life it knows, with a monster giving that anxiety a much more immediate form.

The danger also grows as it becomes clear that certain characters have agendas they aren’t sharing. Without giving away who wants what, those competing interests make an already desperate situation worse for the people still stuck on Snook’s Arm. Surviving isn’t simply a matter of figuring out what’s in the water; it also means navigating people whose priorities may not line up with everyone else’s safety. That adds welcome tension, although the accumulation of secrets and revelations sometimes crowds the storytelling. The later episodes reach for bigger emotional and thematic payoffs, and a little more breathing room would have helped some of those developments land more naturally.

Even with those weaknesses, Below offers more than a disposable run through familiar monster-movie territory. Hartnett holds the emotional center, the coastal atmosphere gives the horror texture, and the town’s uncertain future makes survival mean something beyond escaping the next attack. Its late turns give the creature story another dimension, while the human conflicts keep the threat from feeling comfortably predictable. The strongest material remains the people trying to protect a home while disagreeing about what protecting it actually requires. The creature gives that struggle teeth, but the harder question remains human: how do you know when staying is an act of love, and when it’s just fear of letting go?

I find it difficult to write about my favorite movies, because it can be hard to put into words why I love them so much. It seems that nothing I can say will do the movie justice. FREQUENCY is one of those movies that I abolutely love, and I’ll tell any person who will listen that it’s one of my all-time favorites. Sadly, I run into quite a few people who aren’t even aware of the almost 25 year old film at this point. That just doesn’t set right with me, so I’m here today to sing the praises of FREQUENCY!

FREQUENCY stars Jim Caviezel as homicide detective John Sullivan, a guy who lives in the same house he’s lived in his entire life. John is still dealing with emotional scars related to the death of his firefighter father Frank (Dennis Quaid), who died fighting a fire 30 years earlier. One night John’s hanging out with his buddy Gordo (Noah Emmerich), when they come across his dad’s old Ham radio. Some of John’s fondest memories of his dad include him speaking with people around the world on that old radio. They hook it up not even sure if it even works anymore. Sometime later that night when he’s there alone, a man’s voice comes across the airwaves. John starts talking back, and that’s when the greatness of this movie starts for me. The two guys start talking about baseball, and the voice on the other end of the line wants to know what John thinks about New York’s Amazin’ Mets chances to win the 1969 World Series. It seems that somehow through movie magic and the “mother sunspot of all time,” John is talking to his own father at the same location, separated by 30 years of space and time. John tells his dad about the specific fire that he dies in on that fateful day 30 years earlier. With John’s warning, Frank is able to survive the fire, and John gets a bunch of new memories that show him growing up with his dad in his life. Unfortunately, the changing of the past has real world consequences in the present. Now, John’s mom Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell) is gone, killed by a serial killer whose “Nightingale murders” had ended with 3 nurses in 1969, but has now ballooned to 10 in 1999. Separated by those 30 years, and not knowing when their connection on the radio might end, John and Frank work together to try to stop the Nightingale killer and save Julia, not knowing what other things they might change in the process.

FREQUENCY is a cross-genre concoction. It’s a fantasy film in the way that it brings people together from two different timeframes. The exact way this is done is never spelled out and shouldn’t be thought about too much. We just know that the phenomenon known as the aurora borealis, which is a natural light show that occurs when charged particles from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field, is going on in both 1969 and 1999. This natural phenomenon is somehow allowing John and Frank to talk to each other. It’s also a solid dramatic thriller as John is able to first save Frank’s life from the fire, and then as the two work together to catch a serial killer (Shawn Doyle) before he takes out Julia. This is put together extremely well by director Gregory Hoblit, who gets solid performances from Jim Caviezel, Dennis Quaid, and Elizabeth Mitchell as the Sullivan family. I also want to shout out Andre Braugher, who plays Frank’s best friend Satch in the 1969 timeframe, and who’s John’s cop partner in 1999. He’s so good in FREQUENCY. Despite winning two primetime Emmy awards, I still believe that Andre Braugher was an amazing actor who was underused during his lifetime. Sadly, he passed away in 2023 at just 61 years of age.

But the reason that I love FREQUENCY is the fantastic notion that a son who’s lost his father would somehow have the chance to talk to him again. Father-son relationships in movies affect me more than anything else, and I’m all in for the way it is addressed here. I cry like a baby every time I watch FIELD OF DREAMS with Kevin Costner, and I also cry like a baby every time I watch FREQUENCY. I mentioned earlier that John is dealing with emotional scars from not having his dad growing up. In this film, we get to hear their conversations and put ourselves in that same position. The film really leans into the joy of this unique opportunity to change the past and erase much of the pain that came with such deep emotional wounds. This shared desire to right past wrongs and erase past pain elevates the film even when logic fails. FREQUENCY got on my radar back at the turn of the century when I read articles about grown men crying in theaters as they watched. I remember telling a friend of mine, a friend whose father had died when he was young, about this film. He told me later of his own emotional experience watching it. There really is something universal about wanting to connect with our parents once they are no longer with us. As of this writing, my own father is still here, yet I am still emotionally overwhelmed every time I watch FREQUENCY. I can’t even begin to imagine what it will feel like if there’s a time that I’m still here, and he’s gone.