101 min | NR | February 5, 2021 | IFC Films
A pandemic deletes human memory the way a hard drive fails. Emma and Jude are newlyweds when the disease starts wiping Jude, and she fights to keep their marriage on record before he forgets her face. The metaphor is enormous and the movie is small and sad.
A pandemic spreads across the world and erases memory. Some people lose decades in an instant. Others watch their past dissolve slowly. Emma and Jude are newlyweds when the disease reaches Jude. Little Fish is not really about the epidemic. It is about whether a marriage survives when one half can no longer remember why it began.
Olivia Cooke plays Emma as the keeper of the record. She narrates their history because Jude is losing his grip on it, and Cooke carries the dread of a woman documenting a love she is about to lose. Jack O’Connell plays Jude with a gentle confusion that sharpens into panic. He registers each gap in his memory as a small physical flinch. Soko plays Samantha and Raúl Castillo plays Ben, a second couple facing the same erasure from the other side. Their arc shows Emma and Jude the ending they are racing toward.
Chad Hartigan directs from a script by Mattson Tomlin, adapted from a short story. The film fractures its chronology and scatters scenes out of order so the audience experiences time the way Jude does. A moment from the couple’s first meeting cuts against a moment near the end, and the edit refuses to tell you which is which. This structure makes the form match the subject. The danger is that a film about lost memory can become hard to follow on purpose, and at points the assembly buries the emotion under the device.
The premise is a metaphor with the dial turned all the way up. Every couple eventually forgets things. This one forgets everything, fast, and the film asks whether the love was real if neither person can recall it. Hartigan reaches for a grand emotional payoff and lands part of it. The performances earn more than the structure delivers, and the result is a tender film that keeps you at arm’s length from the heartbreak it is chasing.