I was so sad the day I met ya... I can't remember why.

What if COVID doesn't kill you, but either slowly or instantly wiped your memory away?

Ahh, a beautiful tragedy, a tragic modern Romeo and Juliet.

Probably one of the saddest movies this year, Little Fish told a couple trying to hold on to each other with feelings in a world where memories are getting eaten away. Logically, as a way to test memories, you ask another person about a memory or fact that both of you shared. The movie was a slow and painful descent to the inevitable. It's depressing to see such breathtaking and beautiful memories that the couple shared being crushed into nothingness by the harsh reality.

As I said, I loved the scenes where the couple talked about how they got together. The little fish scene was definitely the best. It's creative and unique to the couple. However, the most beautiful part was also the most cruel part. Also, the ending just made all the depression before worse.

Overall, a beautiful juxtaposition of joy and sadness. 9/10.

"Little Fish" is a Drama - Romance movie in which we watch a couple dealing with a memory loss virus that is spreading around the world. The couple has to deal with their new reality and face the difficulties that come with it.

I found this movie very interesting since it had a very interesting plot with some plot twists I could not predict. The direction which was made by Chad Hartigan was very good and he presented very well his main characters something that made the audience familiar with them and it could relate to them. Both the interpretations of Olivia Cooke who played as Emma and Jack O'Connell who played as Jude were very good and their work together created this beautiful result. Finally, I have to say that "Little Fish" is a nice movie to watch but I suggest you to give some time in the movie and I am sure that you won't be disappointed in the end.

"Little Fish," as others have recalled, is conceptually similar to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004),of a romance between one character remembering and another losing those memories. Heck, it's not entirely unlike "The Notebook" (2004),either, and maybe there are more romance movies about guiding one's lover through their past, but I forget. As in "The Notebook," the woman is the writer of the remembrances, and she also narrates--the storyteller twice over. As opposed to the dream-like interaction of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," the other main reflexive device here is still photography. A photographic memory (motion pictures) about recollecting through snapshots--clever. Two minor characters, friends of the main lovers, are also musicians--the score always being important in these sentimental stories--and there's the memory tattooing business à la "Memento" (2000)--and a somewhat similarly circular narrative to go with it. The cinematography may even be argued to be derivative of more intricate ruminative romances by the likes of Wong Kar-Wai or Terrence Malick.

Speaking of cinematic referentiality, "Little Fish" stars Olivia Cooke, who was also the girlfriend to a man suffering from a new disability in the recent "Sound of Metal" (2019/2020),which in that case involved deafness and the focus that reflexively brought to film sound. Of course, in this case, it also accidently reflects the real-world pandemic, which delayed its release, by its Alzheimer's-like disorder being an apparent viral outbreak. We even see characters wearing masks in one sequence, although one would think there would be more of that and other precautions if it were a virus. One of the supposed doctors doesn't even wear her mask correctly, while she laughably tells the male lead to put his on. Never mind "Contagion" (2011),"Little Fish" isn't even the only recent romance set amidst a pandemic where they lose their faculties. "Perfect Sense" (2011),especially, comes to mind.

Regardless, it's apt that a movie about memory and the creation thereof would be a confabulation of other movies--especially in the romance genre that rests so much on tropes and fantasies to fulfill audience expectations or studio formulae repeatedly. Indeed, the disease depicted here is but an extreme case of the human condition. We're constantly rewriting memories and filling in gaps with false ones rather unconsciously. Eidetic memory in people is a myth. I remember reading an interesting bit--but from where exactly I don't recall--on the fact that Louis Lumière, inventor of the Cinématographe and other photographic developments, repeatedly described making only one film of workers leaving his family's factory, but it's a demonstrative fact by their continued existence today that Lumière made at least three different versions of that subject. One sees this all the time in film history and history and life in general of the past told through personal recollections. Film historians remain discombobulated to this day over the first film of the world's first female filmmaker, Alice Guy, as the scant remaining documentary evidence is unable to confirm or entirely discredit her telling--years after the fact--of her first Cabbage-Patch production.

Photographic memory, including movies, works differently than the human kind. What I especially love about such pictures involving the loss of some mental or physical ability is when they have a cinematic equivalent. Such is heavily implied here with the aforementioned photography, writing, music and tattoos. Scenes are plotted non-linearly and even replayed differently--just as they're constructed by their human authors. They're reminding themselves through art forms--essentially constructing the film from within it. Cinema itself being but a memory of its own making and a distortion of the reality of actors having played characters in staged events for the camera at that. Many of the best movies aren't so methinks because they may hold some insight into the real world--and if so it's largely in our function as spectator or the filmmaker in the instances of obviously autobiographical pictures. Ultimate cinematic insight is an examination of the art form itself, and that's what we have here. An identity formed by the documentation--photographic, written and otherwise--of memories, but which nevertheless remain ambiguous, fragmentary, illusory.