A woman sits alone by the shore, sobbing quietly. We don’t see her face at first, but we feel her pain. Her solitude is suddenly interrupted when a dog approaches her, followed by a man who looks like its owner. She asks the man if the dog is his, and he instead remarks on how her accent doesn’t match her looks.
Immediately we sense a connection between the two. And they do, too.
“I was so sad the day I met you,” she narrates in a voiceover.
“I can’t remember why.”
The next scenes, we see these same people, Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell), in bed at night as military trucks patrol the streets outside. She can’t sleep, and counting sheep doesn’t help, so she decides to scribble in her journal.
“All these little pieces…so much to remember,” Emma’s voiceover continues. “Focus on the important things.”
Through Emma’s voiceover and recollections, we slowly piece together the fragments of the couple’s story on-screen. Emma and Jude recently got married (“October 14, 2021…a Thursday”), she’s a veterinarian and he’s a musician, and they’re very much in love.
But those sirens and trucks patrolling in the night? It doesn’t take long before we are introduced to a global pandemic that recently struck, and a panic-stricken society slowly caving in. This affliction, a disorder called neuro-inflammatory affliction (NIA), doesn’t kill lives—or at least not directly. Instead, it causes people to lose their memory—sometimes right away, sometimes gradually.
And as this pandemic slowly spreads across the globe, Emma and Jude try to navigate their everyday lives with a belief that they can not only outrun it, but also overcome it.
A Pandemic Love Story of Holding On and Not Letting Go
Jack O’Connell in “Little Fish.” Photo: Automatik Entertainment, 2020.
Directed by Chad Hartigan from a screenplay by Mattson Tomlin (“Project Power”), “Little Fish” is based on an award-winning short story by Aja Gabel written back in 2011. And it’s safe to say that the author might not have thought that, almost 10 years later, her story would depict a pandemic in the not-so-distant future to near perfection.
For a time, Emma and Jude only heard about NIA from secondhand stories and news (“always there, not here”): a fisherman rescued after going missing for days, a marathon runner who continued running long after the race had ended, a pilot who crashed the plane. All these stories boiled down to a common reason: they forgot what they were doing, and how to do it.
That disconnect, however, began to feel real for the couple when the driver of the bus they’re on suddenly alighted and just walked away, apparently not knowing why he was behind the wheel in the first place. And when Jude’s bandmate Ben (Raúl Castillo) starts showing signs of the affliction, it becomes heartbreaking to watch—especially as Ben’s partner Samantha (Soko) does her best to stay with him even as he begins forgetting who she is.
For Emma and Jude, the challenge is to hold their relationship together as NIA ravages dispassionately and threatens to erase anyone’s memories.
‘Little Fish:’ A Timely Metaphor for Love in the Time of Corona[virus]
Holding on is a strong element of “Little Fish.” Photo: Automatik Entertainment, 2020.
But as we know, the real world is often cruel and unfair, and “Little Fish” shows it almost unflinchingly. What’s more is that the film presents the reality under a pandemic that’s reminiscent of today’s world under the Coronavirus.
This foreshadowing eerily resembles what’s happening today: scenes of people herded into a facility for clinical testing. People search for answers as to what’s happening and where to find the cure. Some, understandably scared, fall prey to panic. As the new normal unfolds, the public begins to wear masks, fake cures sprout like weeds, and conspiracy theories contend that the government is responsible for spreading NIA to control the populace.
Smart Filmmaking Choices Make ‘Little Fish’ a Treat
“Little Fish” often hits too close to home due to our current pandemic. Photo: Automatik Entertainment, 2020.
These are a lot to tackle in one film. And indeed, it takes sensitive and smart filmmaking decisions to direct a science fiction film about a world slowly devolving into dystopia, and make the audiences care for and emotionally invest in the movie’s lead characters. It also goes without saying that a film that tackles romance rests its hopes of watchability squarely upon the shoulders of the actors playing the part of lovers.
Thankfully, “Little Fish” ticks both checkboxes, with Hartigan focusing on the lives of one couple and their friends. And that couple, played to haunting effectiveness by Cooke and O’Connell, has never been more believable and relatable. Their uphill climb to keep their love alive as Jude begins to display signs of memory loss is emotionally crushing and heart-wrenching.
Had Hartigan made a misstep with his casting, “Little Fish” might have been just another sci-fi romantic drama film that feeds the eyes but not the heart. Fortunately, Cooke and O’Connell ooze with chemistry here, not to mention their acting calibers to begin with. We care a lot about their relationship and their struggle. Against all odds, we want them to come out unscathed.
Memory Loss Despite Relative Youth
Can lovers hold on to their love while losing their memory? Photo: Automatik Entertainment, 2020.
But what makes it especially difficult to watch is the fact that Emma and Jude are still young. They just got married, with a lifetime ahead of them. Unlike elderly couples in other films beset by Alzheimer’s or dementia, they don’t have long lives to look back on and wax nostalgic.
And now with NIA threatening to cripple them both, how should they carry on? Will they still recognize each other on a deep level, and not simply from scribbled notes they wrote at the back of polaroids to help them recall the other’s names? Are their memories of their time together concrete, or are their minds already going without them knowing? Why do they have tattoos of a little fish on them? Can they still trust their own memories, if at all?
The Heartbreaking Persistence of Memory [Loss]
“Little Fish” asks the tough question: is memory worth fighting for. Photo: Automatik Entertainment, 2020.
And here lies the heart of the film: “Little Fish” might have been an examination of a world where a pandemic renders society into dystopia, but at its core it’s a romantic film that invites philosophical musings to justify one’s thoughts and emotions. Using NIA as a pretext, Hartigan ultimately reveals memory as the film’s central focus. It examines how memory loss affects the intimacy of one couple, and how their emotions can transcend such a loss.
Indeed, “Little Fish” works like an intersection that connects Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and Christopher Nolan’s “Memento.” But at the end of the day, this is an intimate film about a couple’s history of their love and courtship. As well, it’s also about their firm resolve to hold on and not let go, knowing their love story might have already begun existing on borrowed time.
It’s overall a very tough watch, let alone a re-watchable one. But “Little Fish” only needs a single viewing to pack an emotional gut punch; it leaves audiences broken long after the credits roll. As a timely metaphor for a relationship breaking down under a global pandemic no one knows how to overcome, this film encapsulates the frustration and persistence to maintain human connection once it starts slipping away.
After all, all they’ve got is each other. And that memory alone is something worth fighting for to remember.
*”Little Fish” is available to watch on most streaming platforms.
