Little Fish (2021)
...or Perfect Sense, the sequel. No Ewan McGregor and Eva Green here however. Yet the story is pretty much the same. Instead of your hearing, smell or vision suddenly and permanently eluding you due to a virus that effects the brain, here we have potential loss of memory instead.
Both films concentrate on a couple, man and woman, as the ravages of this incurable disease may or may not take hold of one or both of them, and how they would hope to cope, if it did.
And like Perfect Sense, this is mostly slow, deliberate and melancholy.
This time we have Olivia Cooke and Jack O'Connell as the young married couple with the rest of their lives to look forward to.
Where the aforementioned film was more of a two-hander, set almost entirely in their apartment, this project also chooses to highlight the effect this disease has on others, and the ripples of pain and misery that flows from victim to friends, family, anyone that they had any connection to.
Culturally significant in times such as these, where turning a different corner could have you struggling to breathe in a hospital bed a week later, this also put the viewer in mind of not only the very real personal threat they themselves could easily suffer from something similar, or if they are fortunate enough to live that long, then potentially they have senility or dementia to possibly look forward to instead.
On the whole, not a great deal to be jolly or upbeat about then, it would seem, and no, there are not hatfuls of laughs to be found here, but if you were expecting them, you're probably sitting in the wrong seat.
The pace matches the mood, languorous but far from seductive for that fact, the acting is great as you would expect, but quite how much is asked of these two main players is more of a question than what they could have achieved if allowed to let rip. I expect it would not have matched the mood of the piece, had they been allowed to do so, but at the end of this potential spectrum where we are sitting, firmly at the far end of the 'batshit rollercoaster' scale, it just sometimes feels like an opportunity missed.
Nothing really horribly wrong with this at all, save for the meandering and time afforded to what seems like inane trivialities. Worth a watch, especially if you've already seen the McGregor/Green stab at the same kind of thing which I personally enjoyed more.