By There are certain horror setups that will always be rolled out no matter how many times it has been done, simply because of how effective they continually are when it comes to stoking fear in an audience. Sea Fever takes on a couple of these setups, mixing in the parasitic paranoia of The Thing with the one location claustrophobia of Alien and the aquatic threat of Deep Rising to deliver a horror thriller that provides a solid genre experience, even if it is as derivative as they come.
Hermione Corfield stars as Siobhán, a graduate doctorate student who studies the behaviour of sea creatures. When she joins the crew of a West Ireland fishing trawler to observe any anomalies out in the fishing lanes she gets more than she bargained for after a mysterious tentacled creature contaminates the ship’s water supply with a deadly parasite. How many of the crew will make it off the boat alive?
Setting a horror out in the middle of the ocean is always a quick fire way of establishing a sense of claustrophobia, and Sea Fever is quick to hit the big blue so that this crew can sail out on their doomed journey. From old sea omens unsettling the more superstitious of the crew (Siobhán being a redhead creates a lot of tension), to the Captain and his wife (Dougray Scott and Connie Nielsen) desperate to make this voyage a profitable one for all on board, debut feature writer/director Neasa Hardiman wastes no time in ladling on the dread.
Full review over at VultureHound, originally published April 14th 2020.
Andrew Gaudion 