With every new film release, it’s harder to forget the effects COVID-19 has had on our society and culture. One watches films and television shows, bewildered at the lack of masks. On the other hand, viewers lament COVID-19’s inclusion in entertainment, longing for escapism. Little Fish, directed by Chad Hartigan, was made before the pandemic, but focuses on a chilling illness of its own — NIA, a degenerative disease that afflicts people with memory loss. However, Hartigan’s film, rather than a sweeping pandemic statement meant to incite hope with easy answers and easy villains, is the story in the background of a blockbuster film: small, intimate, romantic, and ultimately tragic.
Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell) are a married couple trying to survive as the mysterious NIA spreads throughout the globe. The stress of the disease is weighing on Emma, when Jude suddenly begins to lose his memory, forgetting details, then faces, then feelings. Cooke and O’Connell have magnetic chemistry built around gentle teasing and soft kisses. Hartigan’s directing pulls through especially well, showing their relationship bathed in neon lights from fish tanks and club strobes, often hiding their conversations in place of painting a portrait of a doomed couple. A split-screen sequence shines showing the beginning of the end for Jude, as he stares mystified on one side of the screen and caresses Emma on the other, knowing he may never recognize his wife again.
Mattson Tomlin’s script works wonders as it tells the backstory of Emma and Jude achronologically, sprinkling in first dates and kisses as memory tests for Jude. They have their first kiss in a club, but what was the pattern on the wall behind them? The room they’re in is painted yellow because Emma hated the drab gray, but what season did they paint it in? This gives Cooke and O’Connell rich material to develop a complex relationship while bending temporal rules, mixing flashback with present. Side characters Ben (Raúl Castillo) and his wife Samantha (Stephanie Sokolinski) have far less screen time, but make just as much of an impact as Ben’s memory deteriorates so far he pulls a knife on the woman he loves then breaks down in tears.
The film shines when bending rules and breaking linear sequences, pushing flashbacks and unfamiliar settings. Its slow pace, though, often makes it more of a saunter than a waltz. Scenes seem longer than they should be; every scene matters, but the journey through them sometimes feels aimless. Little Fish does, however, pick up once things become personal, and we see the effects of the memory loss disease on Jude and Ben. When Jude’s condition worsens, the film anchors itself on O’Connell’s performance, with all of the wonder, heartache, and fear he feels each day as he discovers what he used to know. One scene illuminates the meaning of the title for both the audience and Jude, and O’Connell plays his surprise and disappointment for a good laugh.
But it’s Cooke that anchors the film throughout. Exhaustion paints her face as she sinks deeper and deeper into her obsession with NIA. With the flashbacks, Cooke navigates every emotion Emma feels rapidly, maneuvering between her heart beating out of her chest with excitement at her first kiss with Jude to her heart sinking as everyday his condition worsens. Cooke’s voiceover leads us along this journey, a soft whisper that starts as an exposition dump explaining the virus to a worn soul isolated by Jude’s memory loss.
COVID-19 is a virus that no one wants to face the reality of. Over 400,000 people in the United States have died from the illness, but this number is meaningless to millions as they continue to ignore quarantine rules. Hartigan’s film works as a small story of what a pandemic really means on a small scale, placing the audience right in the center of two people’s personal grief. It meditates on grief and memory in a way the human mind can understand — in small, imperfect glimpses. There is no one way to deal with loss, as there’s no one way that diseases manifest themselves. The details change, the minute plot points escape you, but the feelings are consistent.
If anything, this might be the most COVID-19 film made pre-COVID-19, right next to Contagion. Yet, unlike the high stakes and huge Hollywood stars of that film, Little Fish represents the human condition on a small scale. Imagining thousands of people dying en masse is impossible for our minds to handle, but watching one person we love and labor over fade away? That is reachable, close, soul-wrenching. Hartigan, Tomlin, Cooke, and O’Connell all understand this, and ground their pandemic romance with a mix of realistic emotions and dream-like sequences that capture love and loss.
