“Mother of Jesus, a redhead!” That’s how loner marine biologist Siobhán (Hermione Corfield) is greeted by a tight-knit sea crew when she hops onboard a ragged fishing trawler in director Neasa Hardima’s sci-fi horror “Sea Fever.” The superstitious fishermen and women see redheads as bad luck, doctoral student Siobhán shrugs it off as mere folklore. She joins this sea expedition to study faunal behavior, planning on photographing the catches made on this expedition for scientific anomalies.
The ragtag crew onboard is composed of married couple Freya (Connie Nielsen) and Gerard (Dougray Scott), old seahand Ciara (Olwen Fouéré), bright architect Omid (Ardalan Esmaili), dimwit Sudi (Elie Bouakaze) and Johnny (Jack Hickey) who quickly catches Siobhán’s lustful green eyes.
Call it “Alien” at sea, as Hardima’s predictable body-horror hits familiar notes, but delivers enough jolts to not be totally disposable trash. It’s a midnight movie with a decent amount of artistry in its bones
The doom and gloom happens when the ship hits a thud, the engine gets jammed, the radio stops working (of course) and green goo starts spilling into the cracks of the ship’s walls. Siobhán ends up diving to investigate, what she discovers defies science, an unknown specie with abnormal tendrils and gushing liquid, only if you dare to touch it.
Despite Siobhán’s calls to retreat and sail back to fair ground, the crew refuses to abandon the mission, dumb decisions are made in the name of honor, ego, and money. It takes one member of the crew to get infected, his eyes literally explode, for the red flags to be met with seriousness by the crew. As it turns out, if one person onboard is a carrier then the rate of infection for the rest of the crew is high. Siobhán says a quarantine is needed, but, in a sheer state of panic, the crew doesn’t abide by the request, they want to go back to the shallow ground despite the risk that they might infect mass populations due to the severe contagion of the disease— talk about relevancy in the age of COVID-19
Gorgeously shot by Hardima and DP Ruairí O'Brien, “Sea Fever” uses cliches as old as time to tell its story of survival, we know almost every passenger on this boat will be killed off, one by one, by this mysterious tentacled monster, it doesn’t help that almost everyone on-board, except for Siobhán and Omid, is oblivious to the dangers until it’s too late.
Corfield is the clear standout, mostly known for B-movie horror, this is the closest to a breakthrough role the 26-year-old has had and she defiantly carries the movie on her own scrawny shoulders, even when Hardiman’s none-too-original screenplay hits bumps along the road and prevents her role from being fully-fleshed out.
“Sea Fever” is the kind of movie that is a dime a dozen in horror cinema. A survival tale that recycles tropes that have been around since Ridley Scott presented to us the Nostromo crew in 1979’s “Alien.” However, instead of taking the cliches and reversing them over their head, Hardiman decides to go with a more by-the-books approach. There are flashes and hints of a better movie hidden underneath “Sea Fever,” the tentacled predator is uniquely designed, ditto the way it can infect and kill through invading leeches in the eyes, but there’s not enough here to make it stand out above the norm. [B-]
“Sea Fever” is now available on VOD and digital platforms-
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.