This dystopian nightmare though has nothing to do with Covid-19, instead it is Neural Inflammatory Affliction (NIA) sweeping the globe. If contracted, it can mean a pilot suddenly can’t remember how to fly, a marathon runner forgets to stop running, or the sufferer wandering the streets aimlessly because they’ve forgotten where they live. Even more disturbing, for some people, it happens all at once, while others just gradually fade away. And there’s currently no cure. Vet tech Emma has experienced first-hand people who used greet her warmly now presenting blank-faced, while she worries about her ageing mother’s ability to get her husband’s name right. Then there’s Jude (Jack O’Connell) himself, a man who once “always had a camera in his hand and a photograph in his mind”. Recently, Emma has kept him under constant watch, looking for NIA symptoms, trying to keep his brain sharp with teasers and puzzles and fearing that – one day – she might wake up and he doe
Wed 5 May 2021 12.00 EDT
Once you get past its note of emo-mawkishness, thereâs 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 LA author Aja Gabel.
Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack OâConnell) 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 theyâve forgotten theyâre supposed to stop. The coupleâs 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.
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There’s been a quiet but proud tradition over the last 20 years or so of wrapping very adult dramatic themes around sci-fi or horror concepts.
The little-seen
Perfect Sense, which starred Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as a couple trying to fall in love in a world ravaged by a disease that gradually cripples the human senses one by one, was as emotionally deep and heartfelt a love story as you’d care to watch. Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go was sublime – even though the premise is unmistakably science fiction, there isn’t a flying car or laser gun in sight.
SYNOPSIS:
Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell) are in love.
Little Fish charts their relationship and speculates on the importance of memory in keeping them together.
Little Fish is a film created in flashback and grounded by two understated performances from Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell. Directed by Chad Hartigan,
Little Fish is both character study, retrofitted rom com and philosophical fable with contemporary undertones.
Concise in cementing the central conceit of viral infection through memory loss,
Little Fish taps into our fear of degenerative dementia. Structurally it comprises of interlinking memories experienced subjectively from multiple perspectives. Director Chad Hartigan first introduces fleeting moments of attraction between our two leads, then back tracks through recollections personalised in Polaroid pictures pinned to wallpaper. Through the use of in-camera effects and manipulated dialogue audiences experience this disease first hand, wi
about the last year, but despite taking place amid a global pandemic,
Little Fishresonates mostly as a love story. Director Chad Hartigan s sci-fi romantic drama (out now), which was produced long before COVID-19 hit and originally scheduled to premiere at 2020 s canceled Tribeca Film Festival, follows a married couple living in the near future, where a pandemic this time of an affliction that attacks the mind has changed the landscape of human life.
Olivia Cooke stars as Emma, a vet tech married to Jude (Jack O Connell), a photographer and recovered addict. They live with their dog, Blue, in a home marked by a gratingly urban-millennial aesthetic and world altered by the ongoing N.I.A. pandemic a disease that steals your memories, be it slowly or all at once. There are no known precautions one can take to avoid contracting N.I.A. (which is not the same thing as Alzheimer s, as a line casually acknowledging the apparent similarities confirms), nor an existing cure, though c