Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

“When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?” I can’t stop thinking about that line. Surely director Chad Hartigan and writer Mattson Tomlin had no idea when they started making Little Fish that their little indie movie about a pandemic would run headlong into . . . a pandemic. But that’s precisely what happened, and what’s maybe the most curious thing about it is how prescient some of it turned out to be, and how wildly off base the rest of it was.

I don’t recall anyone ever using the word “pandemic” in this film. Do they even use the word “virus”? I can’t remember. Instead, the characters make casual references to what has happened to the world, so that we can piece it all together over time. Some things far more extreme than what we experienced with COVID-19. Grounded flights. Intermittent chaos in the streets. Okay so yes we had that last one in real life, but that was coincidental, about something other than the pandemic.

Other things are depicted as strangely tame in comparison to what we’ve really experienced. In Little Fish, there is all of one scene in which people are wearing face masks. There are no lockdowns. The film does depict government patrols made in an effort to control a wandering population, as the virus here causes dementia—another word never used in the script, but it’s still fundamentally it: people are losing their memories. Like our real-world pandemic, however, the severity and swiftness of infection varies depending on the person. In this case, some people “fade” slowly, and other people just lose their memories all at once.

In that sense, the virus depicted here is very similar to that of the 2008 movie Blindness, in that people around the world are afflicted with something that causes a disability, but they remain otherwise physically healthy. No one in Little Fish comes down with a cough or respiratory illness. They just, in effect, go insane. There are more accidental deaths as a result of “NIA” (“neuroinflammatory affliction”), however, such as when a pilot forgets how to fly. (Tomlin’s script makes no reference to copilots that must have been on that plane. Maybe it' was a small, single-pilot plane.)

This is all the backdrop in which Little Fish tells a micro story within a macro concept: we follow Emma and Jude (Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell) as they struggle to keep the memory of their own relationship alive, while Jack’s memory systematically fades. The same is happening to Emma’s mother who is back in England, though we never meet her; we only observe phone calls. Emma also works at a veterinary hospital, where her job has become little more than euthanizing the increasing numbers of lost pets whose owners don’t remember they’ve lost them.

In other words, Little Fish is a fucking sad movie. Do we really need this right now? I would argue no, but from the point of view of the filmmakers, what choice have they got? What insane timing for the making of a movie like this, whose planned premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2020 had to be postponed due to an actual pandemic. Given the long tail of this globally massive event in all of our lives, there was never going to be a time anywhere close to now when the release of this film would be “better.” So, once at least some of the dust has settled, it might as well be released now. And still, although it’s very well made, especially for the clearly small budget impressively maximized by Hartigan, I don’t have it in me to recommend it. Too much of it hits too close to home.

And I haven’t even yet mentioned that it was filmed in Seattle, which is where I live. I wonder if it goes down easier for people who don’t live here? I sort of doubt it. I keep going back to that line: “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?” How could anyone better summarize the year 2020? For literally everyone on the planet? This is supposed to be science fiction.

And to be clear, much of it very much is. An experimental surgical procedure is developed that involves puncturing the brain through the roof of the mouth. This makes for one particularly harrowing scene, but also strains the boundaries of plausibility. And even though this is clearly far from the point of the story, I sure wish someone in the film revealed even the slightest hint of how this virus spread. With the exception of when Jude applies for a clinical trial, no one here walks around wearing a mask. Is this just happening to everyone randomly without explanation? Apparently so, as is the case far too often in movies about a global virus, and it’s a bit annoying.

Chad Hartigan is clearly much more interested in telling a sort of inverted love story, where the young couple starts to forget how they fell in love in the first place. Does that sound like fun? Little Fish is like a mashup of a pandemic disaster movie and one of those movies about an elderly couple coping with Alzheimer’s. Except in this case, the couple is young—which is really the most novel thing about this film. In any event, everything about it is tragic, only the tragedy is realized in a slow burn, a creeping melancholy that might serve as a useful trigger any time you need a good cry. Which, to be fair, far too many people these days absolutely do need. I’m just not sure they need it from something that cuts so deep into the heart of all our actual lived experiences: a collective feeling of heartache and loss.

Had Little Fish been made even one year earlier, I might be more inclined to consider it a recommended watch. It actually is very well done. I could even say it is indeed a recommended watch . . . just not right now. Maybe just bookmark it for a watch five or ten years from now.

*What you need to know is this movie will make you very sad.*

Overall: B+