Sea Fever (2020)

Sea Fever places a doctoral student in deep sea faunal behavior aboard a West of Ireland trawler and lets a bioluminescent parasite handle the rest. Neasa Hardiman writes and directs, and the crew she assembles is a quietly international bunch: Iranian, Black, Scandinavian, Irish. Nobody remarks on it. The film casts competent actors and moves on, which is either admirable restraint or a missed opportunity for a lecture, depending on your appetite. Hermione Corfield's Siobhan is the outsider, awkward, obsessive about her research, more at home with data than with people. The film observes this without ever diagnosing it.

The plot has attracted readings it did not ask for. Critics found climate change in the exclusion zone, the overfishing, the contamination. They found a pandemic in the quarantine argument, and given the release timing, the comparison wrote itself. Gerard's illegal entry into protected waters springs from economic desperation, a nod to the pressures on commercial fishing that never hardens into a thesis. Siobhan's demand for thirty-six hours of isolation is the closest the film comes to preaching, and even then the creature keeps interrupting her.

This is a modest, well-made genre picture with progressive furniture arranged tastefully in the background. A woman directs. Women hold the wheel and the microscope. The ensemble looks like the actual Atlantic. None of it is argued, which is the film's quiet virtue and also its ceiling. It wants to be a monster movie, and it is one, competent and chilly and content to let its metaphors drift unexamined in the water. We are left with a taut eighty-nine minutes and the faint sense that everyone involved knew exactly how much to say.