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.
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
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. We see an elderly woman crying in a
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 . The film’s terror is not in the jump
