Sea Fever

As the parasitologist Carl Zimmer once observed, “There’s a lot more real estate within the body than without.”

He was talking about suitable homes for microorganisms. In cold seas, cosy spots are particularly hard to find. There’s the occasional volcanic vent, there are the insides of cold blooded marine organisms (better than nothing, and then there are the lovely, snug insides of marine mammals. To a marine creature looking for a nice warm place to pass through the parasitic stage of its life cycle, humans are little different. And so we get to Sea Fever, which has been called “The Thing on a boat.” This may be unfair – it has ideas of its own – but it sums up the central theme well enough. It’s full of little scraps of maritime lore and superstition and if you know yours well enough, you’ll see the ending coming.

At the centre of it all is Siobhán (Hermione Corfield), a young scientist who obtains passage on fishing vessel the Niamh Cinn Óir with the slightly suspicious explanation that she’s there to look for abnormalities in the region. Her red hair, revealed when she removes her woollen hat, immediately raises concern, but skipper Freya (Connie Nielsen) decides that as she’s already boarded there’s nothing to be done about it. One assumes that she’s paying and that Freya simply wants the money; her business, like that of many fisherfolk, has been struggling recently. Perhaps it’s something connected to that that leads to the boat leaving its previously agreed course and ending up in the Exclusion Zone.

Siobhán’s scientific background adds a bit more depth to the film once the main plot gets going. Viewers with a grounding in biology will appreciate writer/director Neasa Hardiman having done her research properly, just as the crew – or most of it – comes to appreciate having someone on board with expertise. Johnny (Jack Hickey) appreciates the redhead for another reason, but this isn’t a love story. The various different relationships between crew members are well drawn and we really get a sense of them as a family brought together emotionally through the day to day toughness of their work. When someone dies, there’s grief that feels real, as disorientating as any fever. The sort of love that’s there in real life but tends to be elided in films like this.

All of the characters have well developed backgrounds and scraps of information about them emerge in an economic way that doesn’t detract from the main story. As one might expect with a story of this type, there’s quite a bit of gore, but nothing out of keeping with what parasites can do in real life. The downside of all this realism is that it limits where the story can go. An early underwater sequence delivers an encounter with a different type of peril (again nicely tied in to maritime lore) but thereafter Hardiman relies on threats that are harder to see, the claustrophobic atmosphere within the ship and inter-character tension which, despite good work from the actors, doesn’t always grip as well as it might. Siobhán’s existential concerns, dismissed by most of the others, require a certain level of understanding from the audience in order to hit home, and in this regard the film might have come to public attention just a little too early.

Though it might not be the most original story out there, Sea Fever is intelligently put together and, for the most part, well delivered. Within the scope of its ambitions it’s an effective piece of work and one that suggests we can expect interesting things from Hardiman in the future.