It contains one of the most shocking, jaw-dropping deaths from a movie in recent years.
Receiving its worldwide premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in late 2019, Sea Fever then debuted in Ireland and the UK in 2020, right around the time that the pandemic had completely shut down the option of going to the cinema.
It also didn’t help that some noted a weirdly prescient plot that actually mirrored the worldwide events of the pandemic at the same time, so maybe audiences weren’t in the right headspace to see a movie with that narrative.
Now that we’ve all (mostly) put that behind us, now is the perfect time to visit this mostly-completely-overlooked Irish horror.
It tells the story of Siobhan (Hermoine Corfield), a PhD candidate studying deep-sea faunal behavioural patterns, who joins a crew (some of which are played by Connie Nielsen, Dougray Scott and Olwen Fouéré) on a fishing trawler as they head away from the Irish coast.
Warned by the Irish Coast Guard that the area they’re heading into is an exclusion zone, the trawler illegally heads in anyway, and it isn’t long before the cross paths with what they believe might be a newly discovered type of giant squid. And from there, things only get worse for them…
With a score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, it ranked as one of the best scary movies of 2020, with some critics giving glowing reactions:
SlashFilm – “This is an intimate film with grand ideas, a small boat floating on a giant ocean, and the extraordinary discovery at the heart of the narrative is outweighed by the sense as a filmgoer that we’re seeing a talented director coming to the surface, sticking her tendrils in, and reshaping our expectations as we’re taken along for the journey.”
The Playlist – “The initial draw of Sea Fever might be as a monster movie, but this is a profoundly humane and humanist film whose ideas stays with you longer than the nightmares.”
AV Club – “Despite some overly literal tributes to the films that inspired it (namely Alien, Jaws, and The Thing), Sea Fever’s vision of humanity’s insignificance in the face of nature is exactly the sort of awe-inspiring message some of us need to hear right now.”
Paste Magazine – “While Hardiman couldn’t have foreseen the elevated commentary her film would take on six months after its TIFF debut, it’s refreshing to have a film that takes itself so seriously by refusing to sacrifice its moral stance in order to satiate the anxieties of viewers—anxieties that have become more prescient than anyone could have imagined.”
Sea Fever is available to watch on Disney+ right now.
Clip via Wildcard Distribution
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