âLittle Fishâ Review: Do You Remember Love?
This sci-fi romance imagines a world with widespread memory loss through the eyes of one couple.
Olivia Cooke and Jack OâConnell in âLittle Fish.âCredit.IFC Films
By Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
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Chad Hartiganâs âLittle Fishâ is set amid a pandemic. Not the one weâre currently living through, but one that raises many more existential questions. Instead of Covid-19, the filmâs fictional world is suffering from NIA (neuroinflammatory affliction), which causes a mysterious, mass memory loss.
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About halfway through “Little Fish,” a romantic drama directed by Chad Hartigan, Emma, played by Olivia Cooke, poses an impossible, heartbreaking question to the audience in a voice-over. “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?” It’s an idea that we’ve all collectively had to contend with, 11 months into a pandemic that’s claimed more than 2 million lives worldwide. How does one person deal with the devastation in a way that captures the scope of such a tragedy?
Film Review: ‘Little Fish’
This sci-fi love story takes place during a pandemic, when a virus causes its victims to lose their memories
AP
The year is 2021. A frightened, angry crowd lines up outside a medical center, desperate for a cure for a terrible virus. “He pushed in front!” someone shouts.
Talk about timing. When he began making Little Fish, an intimate and affecting romance in a sci-fi setting, director Chad Hartigan had no idea the world would be coping with a real pandemic in the real 2021. Watching this fictional society begin to fray in panic feels just a tad too close for comfort.
2/5/2021
Olivia Cooke and Jack O Connell play a couple confronting a memory-destroying pandemic in Chad Hartigan s drama.
A sad, gorgeous film about love amid a pandemic, Chad Hartigan s
Little Fish features not our real disease (it was in the can before COVID-19) but an invented one in which healthy people lose chunks of their identities bit by bit or all at once. Think Alzheimer s, but a more aggressive and unpredictable affliction, and one that hits a shocking percentage of the world s population. Crucially for this story, it strikes the young as well as the old, so a couple who are barely past their wedding day (Olivia Cooke and Jack O Connell) can have their beautiful lives torn apart by it in slow motion. Based on a short story by Aja Gabel, it makes a global crisis intensely personal, even romantic.
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