LITTLE FISH
Jack O’Connell, Olivia Cooke, Raul Castillo, SoKo
Little Fish, the just-released IFC Films movie intimately charts society’s unraveling through a pandemic and the effect it has upon two couples. Olivia Cooke’s character, Emma, puts a voice to our worldwide sorrow with just a few select yet moving words:
“When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?”
Little Fish imagines a world not all that dissimilar from our own harried and uncertain times. But instead of a respiratory illness carrying a looming threat of blooming into something more sinister, Little Fish introduces us to neuroinflammatory affliction (NIA) and its sweeping cognitive effects. One by one, Emma (Olivia Cooke), a vet tech, and Jude (Jack O’Connell), a photographer, bear witness to their friends, family, and loved ones who start to lose their memories, minds, and very sense of self as NIA travels the globe. As the affliction sears through the worldwide population, we hear tales of fishermen forgetting how to steer their boats, pilots forgetting how to fly while mid-air, and people who begin to run marathons and eerily forget to stop running.
For Emma and Jude, the first flickering signs of NIA appear in their close friends, the couple Ben (Raul Castillo) and Sam (SoKo), two wildly artistic, creative, and musical souls. But only when it begins to creep ever-closer, to their family and into their still-young marriage, do they feel the truly gutting and horrific aftermath. Patching together their lives through Polaroids and notes early on, they soon must go to even greater lengths to retain what matters most to them; their love, earliest beginnings, and what keeps them bound up to each other. As Emma so intensely puts it: “I find myself wondering how to build a future if you keep having to rebuild the past.”
Clinging to chilling experimental treatments, blind hope, and the very essence of Emma and Jude as individuals and a couple, Little Fish shows us how far we can go to keep sane and grounded in a world turned upside down.
Directed by Chad Hartigan and told through artful cinematography and the almost-hazy, blurring effects to infer the creeping symptoms of NIA, Little Fish is at once a film for these exact times and one indelibly for all times given how deeply it’s sunken into the eternal human condition.
Watch the trailer for Little Fish, available now via IFC Films streaming and in select theaters:
