Little Fish 2020 -

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 .

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. little fish 2020

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.” In the sprawling landscape of pandemic cinema, most

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. Based on the short story by Aja Gabel,

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.

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.

And then — in a choice that has haunted me since I first saw it — Jude makes a decision. He does not leave. He does not call a doctor. He takes Emma home. He lies beside her. He shows her their wedding video on a laptop. She watches two strangers — her former self and Jude — exchange vows. She does not recognize them. But she begins to cry. Not from recognition. From resonance .