I Watched The Worst Netflix Woke Slop That’s Ever Been Made, And I Barely Survived The Experience

I don’t watch a lot of slop. Generally speaking, I am anti-slop. But every once in a while, a bit of slop catches my eye. There’s something about the slop that I find intriguing, mysterious. I become slop-curious.

When these occasions arise, I know I will almost certainly regret giving in to the temptation. But sometimes the slop impulse is too strong. The siren song of the slop is simply too much to resist. 

That is why I am going to offer a review of what is, at the moment, the most popular piece of slop on Netflix. It is also, perhaps, the sloppiest slop in the entire history of slop.

The show is called Below — the latest streaming hit that millions of people have watched and already forgotten. My wife and I endured the entire show. Now I will tell you about it, with all the detail I can remember, as the memory mercifully fades. 

I do this partly as a warning to anyone who might be on the verge of succumbing to the temptation to watch this atrocity, and partly because I wasted five hours of my life on this thing. 

The logline of Below — at least as it was presented to me by a few close associates whom I will murder in cold blood if I ever see again — is that it’s Jaws, but with a giant killer squid. Needless to say, in theory, Jaws with a giant killer squid is an excellent elevator pitch. It’s basically heroin for white middle-aged dads. We love Jaws, and we tend to think of most non-Jaws movies and shows in Jaws terms. 

The Grey is Jaws but with wolves. Anaconda is Jaws with a snake. Cujo is Jaws with a dog. Tremors is Jaws with giant worms. The Godfather is Jaws with the mafia. The Devil Wears Prada is Jaws with a fashion magazine. Jaws is Jaws with Jaws. And so on. Jaws comes in many forms.

But as far as I know, nobody has ever done Jaws with a squid, which is an unfortunate and rather baffling oversight. As a huge fan of Jaws, and an even bigger fan of squid-based horror, this seemed to me like a match made in Heaven. But then came the Netflix sleight-of-hand trick. 

I thought I was getting some entertaining killer squid action, but I got something else entirely. It’s like in Jaws when Jaws thinks he’s about to eat someone, but instead ends up with a scuba tank lodged in his throat, which Brody shoots, causing him to blow up. 

That’s basically what Netflix does to its audience, trillions of times, across billions of pieces of content. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now. And I have. But, again, I wanted to see the squid. You can’t blame me. I’m not the one on trial here. Back off.

The story follows Josh Hartnett, who last starred in the movie Pearl Harbor and was then exiled into the wilderness for 25 years to atone for the movie Pearl Harbor. Now he’s back, and based on his performance in this show, it seems he has not repented of his sins.

Hartnett plays a man with a tragic past who lives in a remote fishing village in Newfoundland. I will note here that Hartnett and all the other actors have adopted Newfoundland accents for this series. I have no idea whether the accents are accurate. If that is really how people in Newfoundland speak, they should stop. They should not speak at all, especially not on camera, where the rest of the world might be subjected to it.

I mean no offense to the good people of Newfoundland, but it’s just the worst accent I have ever heard in my life. It’s basically what you’d get if you took the most grating parts of the Canadian accent and the Pennsylvanian accent, mushed them together, and then added a tablespoon of Irish, a cup of speech impediment, and a dusting of Elmer Fudd: an ungodly sound, like the sound of some ancient curse issuing forth from the bowels of the Earth. It’s such a bad accent that the New Jersey accent sounds like a Romance language by comparison. 

But even this I could forgive if the show were competently made, or at least watchable, or at least not the most unpleasant thing anyone has ever put on film, including the Hindenburg crash and the JFK assassination.

Josh Hartnett — I don’t remember any of the characters’ names, and it doesn’t matter — lives in the village with his annoying deadbeat son, played by an actor apparently named Charlie Heaton. With all due respect to Charlie Heaton — and I don’t know whether this is just because of the makeup they use for the show or whether he has some kind of genetic condition — he looks like Harry Styles if Harry Styles had a decades-long methamphetamine addiction. Put more generously, he looks like a kind of Rite Aid brand version of Harry Styles.

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In fact, and again, I’m not trying to be rude, but every actor in this thing resembles a Rite Aid brand version of a better actor. Hartnett’s daughter is Rite Aid Ellen Page, before she went trans. Hartnett’s love interest, the brilliant female scientist character, looks like Rite Aid Emily Blunt. The actor who plays Hartnett’s other son is, I think, a guy who actually just works at Rite Aid. And of course Josh Hartnett is Rite Aid Jon Bernthal, who himself was once Rite Aid Josh Hartnett, and they’re both still Rite Aid Christian Bale.  

In any case, these are the principal characters, along with Hartnett’s sister, who lives in the village and appears to be involved in some kind of throuple arrangement that is hinted at but never explained or shown in any detail, thank God. There’s also a boyfriend of the pre-trans Rite Aid Ellen Page who — and I swear I’m not just saying this to stretch the joke out — looks a little bit like a post-trans Rite Aid Ellen Page. 

So there are Ellen Pages running all over the place. Except for the real Ellen Page, who apparently decided that this series was even too woke for her. The boyfriend character doesn’t do anything essential to the plot. You could remove him from the story, and it wouldn’t make any difference at all. That is, in fact, true of every other character in the show, and every random subplot that pops up and goes nowhere. 

The brother character — not Meth Head Harry but the other one — is being chased by two evil henchmen because he owes money to a mob boss or something. It’s never explained why he owes money, who this mob boss is, or how much money he owes. At the end, one of the henchmen gets eaten by the squid. The other one — who has no dialogue through the first five episodes, except to tell us that he’s a Somali immigrant — survives and suddenly becomes best friends with the brother he spent the whole show trying to kill. This subplot could be cut from the show, and it wouldn’t change the story even slightly. It appears to be there just as an extremely convoluted way of wedging a Somali immigrant with a heart of gold into the plot. 

I have to imagine there were much more efficient ways of achieving that goal. You could have made the brilliant female scientist Somali, for example. But I suppose that even for a show about a giant homicidal squid, the idea of a brilliant Somali scientist would stretch the suspension of disbelief beyond its breaking point. 

Anyway, the story kicks off with the arrival of a giant iceberg in the harbor. Along with the iceberg, various villagers and tourists start going missing. It turns out that eating ice from the iceberg will make you extremely sick and might cause you to go insane and drown yourself in the ocean. 

You’d think that a toxic, psychedelic iceberg wouldn’t prove to be much of a threat, because all you have to do is not eat it. And the temptation to eat a giant iceberg floating a few miles away in the ocean should be relatively easy to resist. I know that if I were in a fishing village and someone pointed at a huge iceberg offshore and said, “Don’t eat that. It might make you drown yourself,” I would say, “Sure, fine. I really wasn’t planning to eat the iceberg anyway. But now that you’ve told me that, I will continue with my plan not to eat the hunk of ice floating in the harbor. Not eating that iceberg is one of the easiest things I’ve ever not done.” And that would be that.

But for the residents of this village, the fetishistic urge to eat the iceberg overwhelms them. You have to understand that so much of the plot hinges on the unwillingness of the characters to stop eating the iceberg. Many of them consequently get sick and drown themselves. 

Meanwhile, the giant squid is stalking the waters and killing anyone in its path. And to make matters worse, there is apparently a ghost — a skinny white girl with long black hair hanging over her face, which is the form of every ghost in every horror movie from 1998 to 2017, and now again in 2026 for some reason — stalking the village and, in particular, tormenting Meth Head Harry Styles.

Early on, Meth Head Harry goes out in a boat with a friend and shoots at the iceberg. The squid doesn’t like that very much and responds by chopping Harry’s friend in two, but leaves Harry himself alone, I guess because he already looked mostly dead from the very first scene in episode one. 

This speaks to one of the problems with a premise like this — and to some extent, this is a problem shared by Jaws also — which is that the deadly threat is, again, extremely easy to avoid. If there’s a weird poisonous iceberg in the harbor and a monster squid horribly murdering random sailors and swimmers, then all you really need to do is not go in the water.

Granted, this is infamously a problem for the horror genre in general. If there’s a haunted house, just don’t go in the house. If there’s a chainsaw murderer living in a creepy cabin in the middle of nowhere, just go literally anywhere except the five-mile radius around his property. If there’s a demonically cursed video tape that will kill you if you watch it, just don’t watch it. And so on. 

The job of the writers, then, is to manufacture plausible reasons why the characters would put themselves in the path of whatever hellish force the plot revolves around. Writers have varying degrees of success in this regard.

But in Below, the writers dispense with any plausibility concerns whatsoever, having their characters do things like get drunk and take a boat out to the pathogenic iceberg in the middle of the night, in squid-infested waters. They also rely heavily on my least favorite dopey Hollywood trope of all the dopey Hollywood tropes: characters who possess important, life-or-death information but fail to convey it to the other characters, or who do convey it, only for the other characters to inexplicably refuse to believe them.

At one point, Josh Hartnett and the Scientist Lady watch camera footage of the evil squid dragging two unsuspecting tourists off the beach and into the water, where they are then eaten alive. For anyone who has ever lived in a tourist area, this is one of the feel-good moments of the show. 

Later, Hartnett and Scientist Lady are trying to convince the other villagers that there’s a giant squid in the water. For reasons never explained or even hinted at, they do not show the footage they have in their possession. The villagers therefore spend a while believing there is no squid, and that all the suspiciously squid-like deaths happening in the neighborhood must be the result of COVID or something.

So, if you’re keeping track, our heroes are facing four major problems: A giant killer squid. An iceberg with apparently supernatural mind control powers. A ghostly white girl with a bad haircut haunting the village. And really terrible accents that cause anyone who hears them to gouge their eardrums out with ice picks. This last is more a problem for the viewers than the characters. So that leaves three problems the characters have to sort out.

I don’t need to spend much time explaining how these issues are resolved, because they aren’t. The show spends several episodes implying there might be more to this squid than just a squid — what with the mind-controlling iceberg, the white-girl ghost, and so on — but it turns out the squid is really just a regular squid. 

The iceberg is the nest where the squid has laid her eggs. Why does it have mind control powers? Who knows. It just does. That is apparently the answer to every mystery in the show. Spoiler: the answer is that it just is that way. The end. 

The white girl ghost is just a regular white girl. She lives on a nearby island. She’s not a very nice person, it turns out, but there’s nothing paranormal about her. Why was she showing up in people’s dreams, haunting them in their bedrooms, lurking around darkened hallways, and so on? Who knows. She just was. Don’t worry about it.

As for the squid, not only is it a regular squid, but it’s a nice squid. It’s a mommy squid. She’s been horribly misunderstood. She’s a single mom trying to make her way in this topsy-turvy world. She’s a feminist icon, it turns out, like Lena Dunham. 

Sure, she’s a giant gelatinous monstrosity who grabs her horrified prey with long slimy tentacles, drags them into the icy depths, and devours them whole while they scream in terror, but that’s just how Lena Dunham says hello. 

Back to the squid. We learn that this girlboss cephalopod only stalks and mass-murders humans because she wants to protect her babies. Granted, the tourists she killed were on shore and nowhere near the babies, but they were tourists, so it’s fine. Actually, none of the humans she killed were threatening her babies in any way. But whatever, stop nitpicking.

In the season finale — I’m not making this up — rather than trying to defeat and kill the giant murderous squid, Josh Hartnett teams up with the Scientist Lady to save the squid. 

Specifically, they want to save her from the evil white male corporate guy who shows up out of nowhere in the final episode with a plan to bomb the village in order to kill the squid in order to secure the rights to mine for minerals. 

What do any of those things have to do with each other? Why would you need to bomb the village in order to kill the squid, and how would either step help you in your mining efforts? Nobody knows. He’s just evil. And evil people like to build mines and blow stuff up.  

Hartnett and the Scientist Lady try to explain to the evil corporate white man that it’s not the squid’s fault. She was driven out of her natural habitat because of climate change. But the evil corporate white man doesn’t care. 

He says that she’s dangerous and has slaughtered 19 people, and so must be exterminated — which is actually a pretty good point. I’m on his side when it comes to the squid issue. And I’m also on his side about bombing the village, as these villagers are some of the dumbest and most irritating people who have ever been assembled in one location. 

But that’s not the side the writers want us to be on. So our heroes — well, the writers’ heroes, my hero is the evil corporate white man — devise a plan to save the squid from the military, which has arrived along with the evil corporate white man to blow the squid up. What was sold to me as Jaws with a squid suddenly becomes Free Willy with a squid. Free Squiddy, let’s call it. 

Their plan to Free Squiddy involves moving the enormous 150,000 ton iceberg out of the harbor so that Squiddy will follow it. But the iceberg is too big to move, so the strategy is to shoot it and break it in two. That might make some kind of sense if they were shooting the mountainous chunk of ice with a bazooka or a missile of some kind. 

Instead, they shoot it with a hunting rifle. Meth Head Harry takes a couple of shots at it, to no effect. So then Rite Aid pre trans Ellen Page takes the rifle and shoots, and with her magical feminine powers, the bullet causes an iceberg bigger than the one that sank the Titanic to splinter into multiple pieces.

You’d think this would make Squiddy very angry, since her babies are in there, but I guess Squiddy understands that they’re trying to help her. Next, Josh Hartnett takes a fishing net and drags the remaining piece of iceberg — which is still probably about 80,000 or 90,000 tons — into deeper waters with a small fishing boat. And that’s enough to save the day, although he doesn’t take it that far into deeper water, so the killer squid remains only about six or seven miles from innocent women and children. Even so, the squid appreciates the gesture. She comes to the surface and locks eyes with Josh Hartnett, and the two wordlessly express their love for one another. Again: I’m not making this up. This is what actually happens in the show.

Imagine if, at the end of Jaws, rather than blowing up Jaws, Brody was a PETA activist who threw himself in front of the shark as a human shield to prevent him from being killed. And then imagine if, recognizing this selfless act, Jaws had come to the surface and flapped his fin at Brody in a show of gratitude. And then you will have an idea of just how incomprehensibly retarded this show is.

If I made a parody of a woke Netflix series with exactly this plot and resolution, you would think it was far too on the nose and preposterous even by woke Leftist standards. You would watch it and say: “Come on. There’s a giant squid killing people because of climate change, and so a female scientist and Josh Hartnett, plus his polyamorous sister, have to save the squid from an old white male capitalist and the colonialist military that wants to murder the squid, who’s actually just laid a bunch of eggs and is suffering from postpartum depression? Give me a break.”

But that is, I stress again, the actual plot of this show. A show I sacrificed five hours of my life to watch. 

I am five hours closer to death, thanks to Netflix. My only regret is that it didn’t come while I was watching it. 

Yes, this is what I get for watching Netflix. This is what I get for falling for the classic squid-Jaws bait-and-switch. But this isn’t my fault. I didn’t deserve this. I’m the victim here. Let’s not lose sight of that.

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