Little Fish 2020 -

We see an elderly woman crying in a supermarket because she cannot remember why she came. A former surgeon, now infected, tries to operate but forgets human anatomy mid-surgery. A father fails to recognize his own son. The film’s terror is not in the jump scare, but in the subtle widening of a pupil, the half-second pause before a familiar name, the gentle panic in a lover’s eyes when they struggle to place your face. The film’s structure is its most devastating weapon. Hartigan interweaves two timelines: the painful, fragmented present (where Emma is beginning to show symptoms) and the sun-drenched, hopeful past (where Jude and Emma first meet, fall in love, and marry). It is a romance told in reverse. We watch them fall apart while simultaneously watching them fall together.

Olivia Cooke’s Emma is the anchor — pragmatic, guarded, a veterinarian whose emotional walls are built high. Jack O’Connell’s Jude is the open wound — gentle, earnest, a former mixed-martial-arts fighter with a soft center. Their chemistry is electric not in a Hollywood fireworks way, but in the quiet way two people learn each other’s rhythms. The early scenes — a clumsy meet-cute at a record store, a late-night drive talking about sharks (hence the title’s metaphor: small fish who forget where they’re swimming), a spontaneous wedding on a pier — feel achingly real.

In lesser hands, this would become a melodramatic soapbox. But Hartigan treats it with philosophical restraint. There is a scene — one of the most quietly devastating in recent cinema — where Emma, already showing signs of early NIA, sits across from Jude in a clinical testing room. A doctor asks her to recall a memory. She cannot. Jude whispers, “It’s okay. I remember for both of us.”

And if you can’t remember? Then let someone remember for you. 9/10 Watched on: Hulu (US) / Digital platforms Pairs well with: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , After Yang , a box of tissues, and the sudden urge to call someone you love just to hear their voice. little fish 2020

In the final act, Jude learns of an experimental, highly risky treatment — a “reconstruction” of memory using leftover neural traces. Emma agrees to it, not because she believes it will work, but because she loves Jude enough to try. The treatment fails spectacularly. Emma emerges worse than before, her memories now a scrambled, violent mess. She attacks Jude in a dissociative episode.

Then the memory loss begins. Little Fish asks a question that feels almost too painful to entertain: If you lose your memories, do you lose your love?

But that is the trap. Love is not a solo project. Memory is not a shared hard drive where one person can hold the files for two. When Emma looks at Jude and feels nothing — or worse, feels vague unease — the film forces us to confront a terrifying possibility: that love is not eternal; it is neurological. That “forever” is just a series of electrical impulses, fragile as spider silk. Spoilers ahead, but a discussion of Little Fish demands it. We see an elderly woman crying in a

In the sprawling landscape of pandemic cinema, most films have focused on the visible: the race for a cure, the collapse of society, the hoarding of toilet paper, the claustrophobia of lockdown. But Chad Hartigan’s Little Fish (2020) — tragically released just as the real world shut down — takes an inverse, far more intimate approach. It is not about the virus itself, but about the ghost that follows after: the slow, inexorable erasure of who we are to each other .

The film ends with a voiceover from Jude, repeating the film’s opening lines: “I remember the first time I saw you. You were wearing a blue dress.” But now we realize: he is not speaking to the Emma who remembers. He is speaking to the Emma who is slowly becoming a stranger. And he chooses to keep speaking anyway.

Based on the short story by Aja Gabel, Little Fish is a science fiction romance disguised as an indie drama. It presents a world ravaged by “Neuroinflammatory Affliction” (NIA), a Alzheimer’s-like pandemic that attacks memory. Unlike a normal virus, NIA doesn’t kill the body; it kills the past. One day, you remember your wife’s laugh. The next, she’s a stranger holding a stranger’s hand. The film follows Jude (Olivia Cooke) and Emma (Jack O’Connell) — a young, photojournalist couple in Portland, Oregon — as they fight to hold their love story together while the very architecture of memory crumbles around them. Hartigan makes a brilliant, counterintuitive choice: he refuses to show the spectacle of collapse. There are no burning cities, no zombie hordes, no martial law. Instead, the apocalypse is a quiet one. People wear blue wristbands indicating their “clear” status. Posters on bus stops ask, “Do you know where you are?” The news plays in the background, reporting rising infection rates like weather. The horror is mundane, bureaucratic, and deeply human. The film’s terror is not in the jump

In a world that constantly asks us to forget — to scroll past, to move on, to prioritize efficiency over tenderness — Little Fish is a quiet, desperate whisper in the dark: Remember. Or at least, try.

The final shot is a photograph of the two of them, happy, on their wedding day. Then the screen goes black. No cure. No miracle. Just the decision to stay. We watched Little Fish in 2020 — a year of real viral catastrophe, of isolation, of forgetting what normal felt like. But the film’s resonance has only deepened. It is not a movie about COVID-19; it was written and filmed before the pandemic. Yet it accidentally became the perfect allegory for what we all experienced: the slow erosion of shared reality, the frustration of watching someone you love (a parent, a partner, a friend) become unreachable, the desperate clinging to photographs and voicemails as proof that happiness once existed.