Little Fish, the fourth feature film from director Chad Hartigan, is a romance set in a near-future Seattle teetering on the brink of calamity. Starring Olivia Cooke, Jack O’Connell, Soko and Raul Castillo, the film opens in the midst of a global epidemic: Neuroinflammatory Affliction, a sever and rapid Alzheimer’s-like condition in which people’s memories disappear.
Couple Jude Williams and Emma Ryerson are grappling with the realities of NIA, interspersed with glimpses from the past as the two meet and their relationship blooms. But as NIA’s grip on society tightens, blurring the lines between the past and the present, it becomes more and more difficult to know what’s true and what’s false.
Little Fish is a 2020 American science fiction romantic drama film directed by Chad Hartigan and written by Mattson Tomlin, based on the 2011 short story of the same name by Aja Gabel. It stars Olivia Cooke, Jack O’Connell, Raúl Castillo, and Soko.
The film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 17, 2020. However, the festival was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2020, IFC Films acquired North American distribution rights to the film and released it in theaters on February 5, 2021. Stage 6 Films also acquired international distribution rights to the film. It was released on February 5, 2021, by IFC Films.
Film Review for Little Fish
Once you get past its note of emo-mawkishness, there’s something disquieting and poignant (and rather prescient) about this doomed love story of the future, from director Chad Hartigan and taken from a short story by Los Angeles author Aja Gabel.
Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell) are a young couple living in an America ravaged by a pandemic causing memory loss. The disease has been causing planes to crash, because pilots suddenly forget how to fly, and marathon competitors to keep on running into the night because they’ve forgotten they’re supposed to stop. The couple’s best friends have been hit by the disease, and Emma and Jude are now themselves anxiously monitoring each other for the first signs of forgetfulness, and trying to hoard their romantic memories (so recently made) against the great forthcoming oblivion.
Little Fish has obvious echoes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, though its purpose is to brood more statically on the nature of memory and love. Sometimes it tries the patience, just a little. But it’s a film that is in tune with the Covid age, and it plugs in to one of the great contemporary issues: dementia.
The spectacle of young people suffering memory loss is a bold narrative strategy whose effect is to remind you that the old are not a separate, lesser tribe who somehow don’t deserve to avoid dementia: everyone is equal, young and old, and old people feel the agony of dementia as much as young people would (and sometimes do, in early-onset cases). O’Connell – a very good actor of whom I feel I haven’t seen enough recently – is tender and sympathetic as Jude, and Cooke is similarly intelligent and gentle as Emma.
Little Fish (2021)
Directed by: Chad Hartigan
Starring: Olivia Cooke, Jack O’Connell, Raúl Castillo, Soko, David Lennon, Mackenzie Cardwell, Ross Wirtanen, Heather Decksheimer, Natalie Farrow, Ronald Robinson, Morgana Wyllie, Monique Phillips
Screenplay by: Mattson Tomlin
Production Design by: Caitlin Byrnes
Cinematography by: Sean McElwee
Film Editing by: Josh Crockett
Costume Design by: Mila Franovic
Art Direction by: Andrew Grey, Sarah Roach
Music by: Keegan DeWitt
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: IFC Films (North America), Stage 6 Films (International)
Release Date: October 1, 2020 (Newport Beach Film Festival, February 5, 2021 (United States)
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