Sea Fever

The beginning of the year gave us an alien like confined, isolation, horror thriller based underwater and now we have one on the surface of the water.

From first time feature film director Neasa Harriman comes a decently competent sci-fi  survival thriller on the high seas. I am sure you could classify it as a horror film at IMDB has it listed as one of the genres to describe it, for me I would say more thriller than horror, there are a couple gore scenes,  for the most part its more the tension of who will be next or what is this thing doing. Let’s start at the beginning where we meet Hermoine Corfield’s character, Siobhán, who is working on her doctorate and is told by her professor she must go on a fishing trawler to finish her studies against her wanting to stay in the lab on campus. She is not warmly welcomed by the crew consisting of Connie Nielsen, Dougray Scott, Olwen Fouéré, Jack Hickey and Ardalan Esmaili because she is a red head, if you are not familiar with maritime myths, it is considered bad luck to have a red head on your vessel. Even though this movie is set off the Irish coast where red heads are not uncommon, it is still bad luck to have them on board, which is foreboding because that is just what they encounter a bunch of bad luck or is it a certain captain trying to skirt the rules. You see as they are putting out to see they are warned by the coast guard they are entering an exclusion zone, which unknown to the rest of the crew they have just entered against being told not to. If you are reading this then you probably know movies pretty well and know that doing what your not told, hiding it from everyone else, surely something is bound to go wrong. They encounter something that has latched onto their ship and has started an infection of the crew and one by one the start to be killed off by this thing. This movie is taking cues from a little bit of Alien mashing it up with a little bit of The Thing, you have a creature killing of members of the crew in a confined space, which the director is able to work with very well, it is not the largest fishing trawler but you get the sense of where everything is happening and can see enough to know what is going on. If anything this movie has become more relevant without it even knowing it was going to be, cause I am sure the release date was planned in advance, this is another film that was suppose to be releasing into theaters instead it had the sad honor of going straight to VOD. At the time of writing this we are still going through COVID-19 stay(safer)-at-home orders where we are distancing for the greater good, well as crew becomes infected our main character, Siobhán, specializes in predicting behaviors and knows that they cannot go back home until they know they are not infected any longer, aka stay-on-the-boat to keep from spreading what they have found on the mainland. Movies like this are one of my favorite genre’s, Alien, Leviathan and even Life(2017) are some of my favorite movies, your combining survival horror with the science fiction of sci-fi creatures. Earlier I said this played more thriller to me than horror and that is because a lot of this is trying to see who has it, what is it and focus more on social interactions with the crew than action. There are as I said a couple gore scenes for those that want that kind of stuff, to me less is more, some are gonna be put off by the conversations in the movie, trying to develop more character and bonds with them then focus on running and screaming. If your into movies like those I mentioned, I would check this out, the creature has an interesting design and has the relevant message going for it and even treads into the mankind encroachment on the environment if that is something up your alley. C.