“Are my eyes open or closed?”
The open water, like deep space, is so perfect a setting for horror that it’s kind of amazing that we don’t see it more often. It’s the complete, madness-inducing isolation that does it, I think: the innate knowledge that you are adrift in a country that is so far from your own as to be alien, that you are alone on your boat until something decides you are not. Mankind is unused to being prey. This is what makes Alien work so well, and while Sea Fever isn’t up to that standard – but we’ll give it a break for that, as Alien is one of the best films ever made – it handles itself nicely. It’s a slow burn until it kicks into gear, and is impressively bleak.
On the Niamh Cinn Orr, superstition is seen as fact. Fishermen don’t swim, voyages begin with a prayer, whales are a good omen, and redheads are bad luck. So already doom is spelt for the crew when they take on a marine biology student, Siobhan, whose hair is not unlike that of a mermaid. Siobhan, played by Hermione Corfield with vulnerability that does little to hide the steel beneath, studies abnormalities in fish…something. Look, she studies abnormalities, all right? There’s no shortage of jargon in Sea Fever, and the film actually does itself a favor by only occasionally stopping to lay everything out. Eventually it just becomes part of the rhythm of the characters. (As does their accents; those Gaelic brogues might be mellifluous, but for uncivilized Western viewers like myself, subtitles might be in order.)
Sea Fever makes great use of its 95-minute run time. It’s smooth sailing, more or less, for the first fifteen minutes, when the ship’s skipper, Gerald, steers the trawler into an off-limits area, hoping for a big catch. What this means: the Coast Guard has no idea where they are. That will become important later. The ship’s engineer, Omid, tells Siobhan that “something is changing the texture of the wood.” Sure enough, some viscous, slimy liquid is slowly oozing into the boat. Siobhan goes to investigate and finds half a dozen bioluminescent tendrils attached to the boat. Suddenly we’re in a monster movie.
One of the smartest decisions made by writer/director Neasa Hardiman makes is to never delve too deep into the origin of her film’s monster. Nor do her characters have what might be called typical reactions. Omid wants to kill it; Siobhan wants to safely release back into the ocean. It’s a more thoughtful approach than most horror movie characters might take; it’s an approach with nuance. Sea Fever never derides Siobhan for her ideals, nor does it demonize characters with opposing viewpoints. We know that Gerald taking the ship into an exclusion zone was a bad idea, but we can’t really fault him for it. No one does anything unbelievably stupid, so when the deaths start – this movie has a pretty high body count – there’s actual emotional weight to them.
To Hardiman’s further credit, she even subverts the expected death tally. One might presume the first to go would be Omid, or his fellow engineer Sudi, but certainly not ostensible romantic interest Johnny, whose eyes burst right out of his skull in the film’s most shocking shot. Soon parasites are in the ship’s water supply, and – echoes of The Thing – they never know who might be infected. It’s here that Sea Fever becomes unexpectedly timely as a story of infection and quarantine. Siobhan, a scientist, demands that they quarantine for 36 hours; she is summarily ignored. Sound familiar? I digress.
Corfield is great as Siobhan. At first she comes off as mousy and withdrawn, but as the film progresses she shows us layers to Siobhan we wouldn’t have guessed. Ardalan Esmaili has a surprisingly large role as Omid, who becomes Siobhan’s primary companion. It’s nice that it’s kept platonic, too. Most faces here will be new, save for maybe Dougray Scott and Connie Nielsen, both of whom deliver fine character-actor performances. There’s not a sour note among the entire cast, really, and that coupled with the dreamy cinematography from Ruairi O’Brien make Sea Fever a compelling watch. Really the film’s only major misstep is the occasional close-up on the thing’s tentacles, when you can really see what kind of budget they were working with here.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Sea Fever is especially scary, but that doesn’t mean I’m not recommending it. This isn’t terror; this is drea, the slow, unfeeling march of the inevitable. It’s pure animal instinct, something that can’t be reasoned with. The crew of the Niamh Cinn Orr can’t argue with the thing mindlessly attacking their ship. It doesn’t even care that they’re there.
About Author
