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Can you spot the made-in-pandemic movie?

Little Fish and Open Your Eyes both have that lockdown feel, but one of them was made before COVID-19 even began

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The pandemic has given us oodles of movies inspired by and shot during the event, from the very good (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) to the very wretched (Songbird, about “COVID-23”) to the unfairly maligned – I still think Locked Down, with Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, deserved more love.

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Then there’s Little Fish. It’s very, very good. But it’s not a pandemic movie. It just feels like one.

Get this: A mysterious illness is spreading around the world. Borders are sealed, flights grounded. Local travel is discouraged. Masks are worn. A White House spokesman warns people against a dangerous homemade “cure.”

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But the source material is a short story from 2011, by novelist Aja Gabel, and directed by Chad Hartigan. And the film was shot a year before COVID. How eerie is that?

The disease in question is called NIA, for Neuro Inflammatory Infliction. It causes Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in otherwise healthy young adults, sometimes over months, sometimes in a day. (Air travel was banned after a pilot forgot how to fly while in the sky.) Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell star as Emma and Jude, newlyweds watching the case numbers rise, terrified of getting sick, desperate for news of a cure.

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Contagion meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Fear of losing your memories is a primal terror, for it is akin to losing your very self. Emma, a veterinarian, responds by starting a journal. Jude, a photographer, starts labeling his pictures with helpful tags like “Emma. Wife.” Memory tattoos become popular, although no one directly name-checks Memento.

The couple discuss “haptic memories,” the notion that a touch can be a powerful reminder. They engage in gallows humour: What if the only person immune to the pandemic already has Alzheimer’s? And they ask questions those of us in the real world have had to confront: “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?”

It’s beautiful and sometimes sad, by turns hopeful and scary and funny, and anchored by two strong performances, Cooke speaking in her native Manchester accent and O’Connell doing a fair non-descript North American. (There are so many great British actors floating about these days that I imagine them flipping tuppence to see who’ll be the non-Brit.)

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It’s weird to see our world reflected in Little Fish. But the story would be worth seeking out even if it weren’t such a prescient peculiarity, Contagion meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That extra frisson of recognition is just the icing on this narrative cake.

Ry Barrett and Joanna Saul in Open Your Eyes.
Ry Barrett and Joanna Saul in Open Your Eyes. Photo by Matchbox Pictures Inc.

Not quite as powerful, though still capable of sending shivers down your spine, is Open Your Eyes, from London (Ontario) based writer/director Greg A. Sager. This one was shot in the midst of lockdown, and it shows. There are only two characters (not counting the cat), with screenwriter Jason (Ry Barrett) trying to finish his latest script, while facing distraction from his flirtatious neighbour (Joanna Saul) and from weird noises and leaky walls that might be at least partly in his mind.

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Sager nails all the aspects of pandemic life – enforced normalcy, social awkwardness, bad haircuts – and uses a powerful soundtrack to ramp up the sense of dread as Jason slowly starts to realize that not everything in his hermetically sealed apartment is what it seems. But the drama feels a little loose, spending too much time finding its footing in the early going, and a little too long on a third-act twist that would be better if it hit us faster and then moved on.

Pacing aside, Open Your Eyes is a decent thriller that nicely illustrates what creative minds can do within a small social bubble, even in the darkest of times. Sometimes life imitates art, something vice-versa, but as long as there’s one, we’ll always have the other.

Open Your Eyes (3 stars out of 5) is available June 1 on demand. Little Fish (4.5 stars out of 5) is available June 2 on IFC Films Unlimited.

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