Being Film #2 for Hooptober 2023
Tone is everything. So even if Sea Fever, the debut film from Neasa Hardiman isn’t particularly scary, it holds its tone throughout a solid tale that on the surface may be about a parasitic life form that wreaks havoc on a down and out fishing vessel off the coast of Ireland, but it’s also about a young standoffish woman, hesitant to engage and make friends, and how that changes in a number of ways as she’s forced to deal with what is happening to both her and her fellow crew. It’s a strong, singular vision from Hardiman, and her game cast heaps to bring this low-budget but rich story to life.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Siobhán is a young scientist paying passage on a fishing trawler to study “deep sea faunal behavioral patterns” on board a down and out fishing ship that needs a big catch soon. Only problem is the fish are out in the exclusion zone the Coast Guard has set up. Choices are made, the ship goes its other zone and is promptly stalled out by something…large tethering it in place. Is it just a huge squid? Then why are its tentacles changing the structure of the wood, and what’s with that green ooze seeping through the ship. Pretty soon Siobhán and the crew come to realize they’ve tread upon the feeding ground of something no one has discovered before, and its particular biology has plans for the crew…
Largely limiting itself to the confines of the ship, Hardiman’s cast easts up every morsel of the tight script. Hermoine Corfield has been in other things, but her lead role here as Siobhán has a truthfulness in every decision she makes, from staying apart from the social, tight-knit crew to her fight to ensure that whatever is happening to them doesn’t get back to the mainland. It helps that the rest of the cast is just as game, especially Dougray Scott as Gerard, the captain who ultimately dooms them in the name of ensuring he can save his crew and ship from financial ruin, and Connie Nielsen as his wife Freya, harboring a tragic loss which shapes her own role as things become more desperate.
Working on a limited budget, it’s fascinating to see how Hardiman handles the “monster” of Sea Fever. You only ever get glimpses of the thing in its full form under the water; the majority of the time the aura of the creature is invoked in smaller ways: the green ooze permeating the ship, the flashes of something behind the eyes of the infected crew (there’s a great moment when we see a small larva crawl out of a crew member’s eye), and the bioluminescent tentacles that rise up to anchor the ship. Siobhán theorizes that this is an unknown creature that mistook the ship for a whale, what is happening is not the result of conscious malevolence, but simply natural behavior of a predator. Little good that does as the grisly results of being infected start to rear up in the crew.
In the end a choice needs to be made, and I appreciated how Sea Fever maneuvers its cast into the end game, and how once again genre proves to be fertile ground for more…well, grounded character work.
Cinema Dual 
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