Mark Reviews Movies: LITTLE FISH (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 4, 2021

"I was sad when I first met you," the young woman says multiple times about meeting the man who became husband, "but I don't remember why." That's also how Little Fish begins and ends, with a scene set on a beach, seen once from one perspective and again from another. Director Chad Hartigan's film creates a circle of time. How and why this scene is the starting point are presented as a mystery to a degree, since it seems almost intentionally disconnected from the story's timeline. By the ending, though, we realize the story's cyclical nature is inevitable.

Can we even call it an ending? That's one of the many questions posed, not only by the actual content of this story, but also by Hartigan and screenwriter Mattson Tomlin's structuring of the narrative. This is a film, adapted from Aja Gavel's short story, that exists in a space and mentality in which time is inherently meaningless.

Memories play out as the main story—about a man suffering from a widespread disease that causes memory loss and a wife coping with the gradual loss of the mind of the man she loves—unfolds. At a certain point, it becomes clear that the memories are even more important to this story than the through line in the present day. It also becomes apparent that we cannot fully trust these memories, and if that's the case, what is the real core of this story?

That's the question here, and it's tragic, haunting, and slightly terrifying. We watch as a couple, passionately and deeply in love, tries to hold on to these shared memories, because those memories define who they are as individuals and as a pair. The tragic part is that the ending is a given. The haunting part is that we watch the memories crumble moment by moment. The terrifying part is twofold: This is a world in which the memory-loss disease has reached a pandemic level, and in reality, we know that every understanding we have of ourselves and every connection we have to the people we know and love could be this fragile.

The woman is Emma (Olivia Cooke), a veterinarian living in an unnamed city where armored trucks patrol the streets, offering instructions for people who have or know someone who has contracted the memory-loss virus. Her job now, though, isn't to care for animals. It's to put down lost pets after a certain number of days, since so many people are forgetting to close gates or that they even had a pet in the first place.

After repeating an argument/discussion they had about bringing a doomed dog or two home, Emma realizes that her husband Jude (Jack O'Connell) is forgetting certain things about his life. It's her job now to dig into her own memories of them meeting, dating, falling in love, getting married, and arriving at this point in their relationship. She'll keep reminding him for as long as she can—and for as long as he can remember the reminders.

There's only a thin barrier between the present-day scenes, in which Emma tries to maintain her husband's memories while Jude waits to see if he's to receive an experimental treatment for the disease, and the flashbacks. Emma is constantly narrating the story of her relationship with Jude, either to herself, in order to keep things in order and have a baseline for her questioning of her husband, or to Jude, who must fill in certain blanks to the best of his diminishing capacity.

The main thrust of the relationship is simple. The two met while Emma was semi-dating someone else (The place and circumstances of that meeting, though, are assumed from the opening scene, but it's a sign of how meticulously Tomlin has constructed this screenplay that a later revelation about that assumption puts a disheartening spin on the entire narrative). They started dating, after Jude's good-hearted persistence and Emma's initial hesitation, and things progressed as expected.

They moved in together. Jude proposed, in a sweet scene involving a trip to a pet store. At some point, Jude's memory started to fade. The two know what to expect, because some of these memories involve the sad fate of their friend Ben (Raúl Castillo), who eventually forgot the woman he loved, and his wife Samantha (Soko), who couldn't endure being forgotten. Emma and Jude hope that feelings of love are deeper than memory, but this example suggests otherwise.

The romance is portrayed in broad strokes, dependent mostly on the engaging charms of and chemistry between Cooke and O'Connell, because it's more an idea than something solid and deep. In a way, the particulars—little details, such as the color of the parachutes of a group of toy soldiers or the time of year when the couple painted their apartment—matter more, because they give us signposts for how far gone Jude's memory has become. There are scenes of the two living inside their memories, as Emma recalls one thing and Jude realizes that those details—whether a friend played a song at their wedding or gave them a recording, empty voids where faces should be, even the reason they have matching tattoos—are falsely recalled or simply disappeared.

The film creates a persistent sense of impermanence—of specifics lost, of hopes dashed, of uncertainty about whose, if anyone's, recollections we can really trust. Little Fish is a thoughtful and melancholy tale about love and memory, raising difficult questions about the ability for one to survive without the other.

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