Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Little Fish’ on Hulu, Where A Pandemic Memory Holes People’s Very Lives

Little Fish (Hulu) asserts that love will find a way, even in the midst of a global pandemic. But wait, not that one. In director Chad Hartigan’s emotive follow-up to Morris In America (2016), it’s the rampant spread of a condition that robs the brain of memory which challenges society and his quartet of twentysomething lovers.

LITTLE FISH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It isn’t long after we meet Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell) that we learn about the fraught condition of their world. While all seems safe and cozy inside their little newly married universe, Emma, Jude, their friends Ben (Raul Castillo) and Samantha (Soko), and society at large have been blindsided by the onset of NIA, or Neuro-Inflammatory Affliction, a mysterious condition that snatches memories from the brains of its victims. In voiceover, Emma describes how NIA’s emergence at first felt like an oddball Internet news item. Someone ran a marathon and just didn’t stop. “There’s something quite beautiful to these stories, at first,” she tells us. “But then a pilot forgot how to fly.”

NIA spreads. Panicky folks accost the public health system. Protestors clamor. “The government’s been keeping NIA on the streets just like that fuck Reagan did with AIDS!” And all the while, Emma and Jude’s love story unfolds in non-linear flashback — a pastiche of their initial meeting, whirlwind betrothal, and all of the sun-dappled forest hikes, water park visits, and shared encounters with their musician pals in between. But soon Ben is stricken. At the tattoo parlor where he inks the chords to his most favorite composition, a sign offers “memory discounts” — tats of names, addresses, phone numbers. “No portraits.” The hard facts of people’s lives are slipping away, there’s no cure, and everyone’s struggling to figure out which way is up.

As Jude starts to manifest NIA symptoms, he and Emma fight to keep their love for each other alive, because in a way, it’s all they have left. And the impermanence of their past, of the little pieces of their existence together, becomes increasingly profound. Can true love exist solely in the present, unmoored from its beginnings? As the world steadily forgets itself, living in the moment becomes a tool to stay sane.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, er, comes to mind, when one confronts the meaning and tangibility of memory as it intersects with the human heart. And don’t forget about the de facto mental Post-Its Leonard Shelby tattoos on his body in Christopher Nolan’s Memento.

Performance Worth Watching: Olivia Cooke (A&E’s Bates Motel) and Jack O’Connell (Jungleland) imbue Emma and Jude’s love story with lungfuls of fresh, sweet oxygen, the kind to make you see stars. Their rapport as actors grounds the non-linear storytelling and imperfect recall of Little Fish in an onscreen romance that’s utterly palpable.

Memorable Dialogue: Emma’s mournful voiceover fills in the larger NIA narrative. “All these little pieces…so much to remember,” she says of the representative moments in her relationship with Jude. But their pal Ben had it worse. “When he first started to lose his memory, he kept it a secret, just like everyone did back then…”

Sex and Skin: Young marrieds Emma and Jude share a bathtub and a bed, but their love is expressed in the discovery of matching fish tats and the tactile recall of haptic memory.

Our Take: Even as it loses its collective memory, Little Fish finds a whole lot of heart. It’s a testament to the fine acting skills of its leads, of course, that Emma and Jude’s threading of love at first sight with everyday marital toil and intense heartbreak is the trunk line from which every emotional carrier and pandemic frequency communicates. Director Chad Hartigan and screenwriter Mattson Tomlin can get away with leaving the larger ramifications of NIA’s onslaught as menacing thunder in the distance, or a tower of smoke on the horizon faraway, because the heaviest shit is happening so close. And with its narrative crumbled into scenes of different sizes and places, Little Fish emulates the imperfect validity of the memories we all rely on to show us the way. Some of its best moments take place between Emma and Jude as they probe their recall of what they hold most dear. Did Ben sing them their marriage song, or give it as a gift on a mix tape? When were they married, anyway? For as much as it messes with memory, Little Fish achieves brilliant little ways of picking at the temporal fabric itself.

Obviously, the specter of COVID-19 looms over Little Fish. The now-familiar sight of mobile field hospitals, clinical staff flitting about, and masked civilians waiting in uncomfortable chairs watched over by security officers is not fun to revisit. But unlike, say, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Little Fish‘s general tone isn’t of fear mongering, but of sighing melancholy. It wants to point us toward what matters — in the heart, as well as the head — even as society increasingly can’t remember.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Prepare for a rush of all of the pandemic feels — loss, isolation, masks, public health bureaucracy — but focus on the naturalism of the love story Little Fish pieces together through details memorialized.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Little Fish on Hulu