Directed by Chad Hartigan
Written by Mattson Tomlin
Starring Olivia Cooke, Jack O'Connell, Raúl Castillo, Soko
Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
In theaters and digital rental Feb 5

by Ryan Smillie, Staff Writer

Last March, as COVID-19 spread rapidly throughout the United States and multiple states started to consider lockdowns, Contagion enjoyed a surge in popularity. Good news, it would seem, for Little Fish, a memory-loss pandemic drama set to debut at the Tribeca Film Festival the next month. However, the postponement of the festival delayed the eerily timely film, which is finally making its way to theaters (or however you’re watching movies nowadays) this week. Though our real-life pandemic rages on, Little Fish’s resonance isn’t buoyed by our current circumstances. Instead, it feels adrift, lacking a compelling enough reason to dive into a fictional pandemic.

Little Fish, through a fractured narrative, follows a young couple, Emma (Olivia Cooke, with her natural English accent) and Jude (Jack O’Connell, attempting an American accent) as they fall in love, marry, and deal with Neuroinflammatory Afflication (NIA), the memory-erasing condition ravaging the globe. The setup sounds like a cross between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Contagion, but Little Fish is not interested in the dreamy imagination of the former nor the clinical specificity of the latter. It’s an attempt at an intimate character study (which director Chad Hartigan has previously done so well in This is Martin Bonner and Morris from America) that never really reveals anything about its characters. Sure, we know that Jude is managing his sobriety while working as a photographer and that Emma is a veterinary technician who wants to go back to school, but anything deeper about them or their relationship is overshadowed by massive amounts of information about NIA that needs to be conveyed. What is NIA? How dangerous is it? How are people reacting to it? Is there a cure? What happens when their friend gets it? The world of the film around Emma and Jude is so big that there’s hardly any room for their relationship.  

Despite an underdeveloped character, Olivia Cooke makes the most of her material. Since staring as the titular “dying girl” in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Cooke has been building a resume of impressive performances–unsentimental but affecting in Dying Girl, sociopathic in Thoroughbreds, fragile and concerned in a similar role in Sound of Metal. As Emma in Little Fish, Cooke projects a cautiousness that devolves into desperation, as she goes from being wary of getting involved with Jude to performing experimental makeshift medical procedures on him. For Cooke’s sake, I wish she had been given more to work with. Even in a role that doesn’t require much of her, she’s a compelling presence, and I’m eager to see her for years to come, hopefully in better roles.

It’s possible– maybe!–that I’m being a little harsh on a pandemic-adjacent movie that has the misfortune of being released a year into an unexpected global pandemic. Maybe crowds waiting for access to medical treatment or the constant worry that something seemingly normal might be a symptom of something worse wouldn’t feel quite so tedious if it hadn’t been our reality for so long. Bad timing aside, it seems like there’s too much squeezed into Little Fish–the focus on the disease doesn’t give Emma and Jude’s relationship enough room to breathe, and the non-chronological timeline tries to complicate the movie, but only confuses it. It’s unfortunate that no one involved with Little Fish could know how relevant and how inadequate it would ultimately be.