God rays pierce the deep blue, churning sea. We’re under the water, looking up at the surface. It’s a beautiful sight, filled with color and brightness. But as the camera tilts downward, we see the deep, unending blackness residing just below the surface. It’s not a terrifying image, but it is foreboding, especially to someone with a kind of fear of the sea. Not the sea in itself, but the idea that the world is covered so much in sea water and it’s just absolutely teeming with life...while simultaneously empty and vacant. Dark and lonely.

Solitary.

Siobhán (Hermoine Corfield) understands that solitary loneliness. In fact, she embraces it. We’re introduced to her as she’s working on a project in the lab while her labmates are celebrating someone’s birthday right behind her. “Not joining in?” her professor asks. “I don’t do ‘joining in’” is her taciturn response. She studies behavioral patterns and looks at the bigger picture, determining trends and responses based on massive amounts of data and observation. So that solitary existence is baked into her personality and job field. Except her professor reminds her that she’s needed on a boat as a project to finish her PhD.

The boat, named Niamh Cinn-Óir after Irish mythology, is a fisherman’s vessel captained by its very own Viking named Freya (Connie Nielsen) and her husband Gerard (Dougray Scott). Rounding out the crew of the ship is the incredibly cute and charming Johnny (Jack Hickey), the brilliant engineer Omid (Ardalan Esmaili), his wannabe student Sudi (Elie Bouakaze), and the kind of grandmarm to them all Ciara (Olwen Fouéré).

They begrudgingly take Siobhán on but that becomes more of an issue when it’s discovered that she has red hair. Superstition and mythology are the words of the day, as, like in last year’s Harpoon, we learn a bit about fishermen superstition. It’s something Siobhán shrugs off, telling a character at one point, “you’re confusing coincidence and cause.” It’s a distinction of importance as the crew sees a herd of whales breaching and view it as a good omen while Siobhán sees it for what it really is: something’s wrong.

That something is that Gerard, in an effort to turn around their hideous luck, has led them into an “exclusion zone,” a place the coast guard has deemed off limits. And soon after her “I have a bad feeling about this,” their ship is struck by a large underwater mass. Things have attached themselves to the outside of the ship, pressing circular holes in the hull and secretly a bright blue substance through it.

There’s a large creature in the water, pulsating in hypnotic bursts and filling the ocean with an eerie bioluminescent glow. But what’s more concerning is that it might have gotten in the boat or, worse...inside one of them.

Writer/Director Neasa Hardiman’s debut feature Sea Fever has received a lot of comparisons to Alien and The Thing and at the risk of sounding like a cliche, the comparisons are apt. Like Alien, the characters are blue collar workers who are down on their luck and push things just for a few more shares. Things haven’t been great on the Niamh Cinn-Óir and each person is at that desperate end of the rope. Omid mentions early on when Gerard isn’t able to pay them out that he has a kid on the way, for instance. And class is absolutely an issue discussed briefly. Early on when Siobhán’s examining the work Omid has done, she calls his engineering work brilliant and she immediately asks him why he doesn’t have a better job; “I just mean, as a talented engineer it’s a low status job.”

Trapped at sea, we find ourselves in the midst of the paradox of myth and science. Where a creature that no one has ever encountered exists and Siobhán’s scientific mind trying to understand the implications of the being and how to combat it. That’s not to say that Sea Fever is strictly an examination of science and myth, but that it uses it to put two different groups of people together and then giving them reasons to be paranoid about each other. The story burns slowly with some fantastic bursts of gore, including one gore gag that had me jumping in the theatre.

But the biggest comparison to Alien comes not from the monsters or the way the ship begins to look like an industrial maze-like homage to the Nostromo, but in the way it establishes characters and friendships. So much of the first act is about creating characters who have meaningful relationships with each other so that when the shit hits, it hits hard. As an example, in a scene in which a character is getting patched up, his friend holds his hands, comforting him. These little moments help establish a real feeling of friendship and camaraderie with the cast, with Siobhán on the outside, looking in and determining patterns.

It’s so weird watching Sea Fever, though, right now. I first saw it at Panic Fest and while it was one of my favorite films playing at the festival, I didn’t feel like I could really write about it then in a way I wanted to because of festival brain. But part of the film is, slight spoilers, about contagions and quarantining. So watching it again, quarantined in my home while COVID-19 rages on outside is quite a sobering experience. Particularly as you see the scientist warning our scared fishermen and women about the dangers of mass extinction and the need to self-isolate.

In some ways, Sea Fever feels like the slightly prescient horror film of the time. A film about monstrous organisms and the unseen creatures that might be inside you. A ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.