j* movie reviews 2020

Sea Fever (2019)

Such a super hard oceanic sci-fi...gorgeous and deadly realistic.

This goes somewhere deeper than horror. Personally I'd even consider positioning it as sci-fi drama and it works, it works beautifully. It's an undersea sci-fi of the unknown monster kind. But it is a slow burner - it feels like it beats a real-time kind of drum rather than that of nailing genre beats. It's a European production, set on an Irish trawler helmed by Connie Neilsen playing Freya. The accents are thick and refreshing.

Our main girl Siobhan is a sort of marine-algorithm-behaviourist student whose lab-supervisor lectures her for being friendless... an interesting side to science we don't always see shown... the need to team. Anyway she's soon doing her placement on the trawler, where she will "identify and extrapolate patterns from variations in deep sea behaviour... I need to photograph your catch."

This is set up for chaos when the crew discover she has red-hair, some kind of boat curse. There is a lot of Irish &/seafolk mythology embedded here. Siobhan is struggling to fit in with her new trawler bunkmates when suddenly they're becalmed by a great big tentacly thing. As the "knower" it's her job to try and sort this out.

This film is so tight and well paced that I don't want to explain more of the plot. There are so many small and gripping moments - the horror it finds is the real horror of a real unknown. The intensity is so well done, escalations through "sea fever" psychology and there are smaller moments of shock and gore. There are also some cool conversations about population vs individual health which feel a super poignant right now.

I'd also like to complement the supreme dedication to palette choice here. The commitment to shades of magenta pink and soupy green blew my mind. I have never seen such a clear cut colour choice made so well and consistently before and I really dug it.

This is an excellent and tight little sea film, tight in the drama-horror with excellent sea-space sci-fi guts.

J* gives it 5 stars.