"Little Fish" - Film Review
Slated to premiere at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and ultimately postponed due to Covid-19, Little Fish is the victim of terrible timing. The rights were purchased in late 2020, but Little Fish did not get released until April 2021, a full year into the pandemic. It is not the victim of timing simply due to the delay, but also because Little Fish is about a pandemic. It’s difficult for audiences to muster the desire to see this film while the pandemic continues to rage with no end in sight.
Those who do watch will find a heart-wrenchingly beautiful movie about humans who try to care for each other in the face of something devastating and unprecedented. Little Fish is the story of Jude (Jack O'Connell) and Emma (Olivia Cooke), a married couple, at the beginning of a pandemic of an Alzheimer’s-like disease that is incurable and ravaging the world. Scientists and doctors work day and night to understand who will catch the disease and how quickly or slowly they will lose their memories. The one thing everyone can agree on is that it’s irreversible. Jude and Emma’s relationship is strained once Jude begins to lose his memory.
How does one grieve when their specific tragedy is shared but also isolated from the rest of the world? The human experience is built on communal knowledge and memories. What happens when those memories fade on a worldwide scale? There’s a unique desperation in the memory loss for the people in Little Fish because they are aware of what they are losing. That sort of loss drives some people to violence, and often to a breaking point.
IFC Films
Little Fish’s focus on a pandemic could make the movie feel overwhelming. As we’ve all learned, living through a pandemic is all-encompassing and extremely exhausting. In the case of Little Fish, keeping the focus on one relationship allows the film to avoid feeling too out of this world. Cooke and O’Connell have consistently turned in top-tier performances since 2009 in movies and television series, and Little Fish is no exception. Their chemistry is magnetic, and effortlessly pulls the audience into their love story. Without these strong performances, watching Jude slowly lose the memories of his life with Emma could feel insignificant. Instead, the scenes are melancholic and excruciating because the audience knows that, despite his best efforts to remember, Jude has no option but to forget.
Because of the delays, audiences are going to assume that Little Fish was inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was adapted from a short story written in 2011. No matter when it was made, its message that humans are best when they are in love is timeless. Our greatest treasure is sharing moments with people we care about, whose loss would break us. We hold onto those for dear life.
Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Letterboxd, and YouTube.