A marine biology PhD student is assigned to a research project that requires her to join a small fishing trawler with a crew of six on its last haul of the season. The skipper plots a course to a particularly bountiful spot, but the coast guard warns them off, as this destination has been designated an exclusion zone. The skipper ignores them, against the order of his captain (who is also his wife), and heads into the exclusion zone anyway. Sonar picks up a huge mass heading toward them. The trawler slams to a halt, as if having hit a shoal. The skipper claims the collision broke the radio, but he in fact disabled it himself to avoid the penalty for trespassing into the exclusion zone. The engineer notices strange contusions on the ship’s wooden hull, as if something is eating at it from outside. The student puts on scuba gear and dives in to have a look. She finds that a number of bioluminescent tentacles with lamprey-like mouths have grabbed the boat. The tentacles belong to a huge unknown creature, possibly a colossal marine worm, lurking in the darkness below. Slime from the creature leaks onto the boat. Though the creature releases the ship, the slime carries parasitic larvae that infect some of the crew. The crew and the student are soon at each other’s throats in a struggle to determine who has become a host for the creature’s offspring.
Sadly, this movie annoyed me quite a bit. It opens strong, establishing its bona fides with authentic scenes that show the routine of life aboard the trawler. At times in the first act, it even feels like a worthy successor to Jaws. Its likable seadogs stand in contrast to the aloof science student while the boat heads out onto the open Atlantic to confront an unstoppable monster that will require everyone to put differences aside in order to survive. This all works well until we hit act two, after the student returns from her dive. Then, the movie runs aground on its own Sargasso sea-like obstructions, in the form of extremely poor characterization and a series of pointless anticlimaxes.
It’s upsetting to me when scientists in movies don’t act like scientists. After the main character stumbles upon the greatest discovery ever for her field, she makes no further attempt to document it, can’t be bothered to offer more than a vague account of it, and doesn’t even ask if she can use the radio to report the finding. Again, this is a PhD candidate in marine biology encountering a huge unidentified bioluminescent organism with tendrils strong enough to stop a fishing trawler. Such a find (1) would guarantee her tenure, a lecture tour, and a lucrative book deal, i.e. it would grant an enviable career to a person who, just as a function of contemporary academia, must have been scrambling tooth and nail for years to gain any foothold at all; and (2) would revolutionize her entire field, impacting not just our understanding of the marine worm, if that’s what it is, but of the entire ecosystem in which such a large predator could go undetected. For her to react with mild concern instead of going into adrenaline-fueled, high-gear researcher mode would not happen. She simply could not have survived in contemporary academia long enough to have received this assignment if she were that indifferent to both her career and her field of study. That is, this moment reveals her to be a nonscientist scientist character. The maddening thing is that the narrative does not at all mandate that she be a nonscientist scientist. She could document everything she sees, be as excited about it as any scientist would be, and even attempt to send all her evidence back to shore, and the drama would play out the same. They are hundreds of miles out to sea in an exclusion zone with a broken radio.
Furthermore, entirely apart from this issue, which admittedly won’t bother some people, the script itself seems to be infected with a parasite that causes it to neutralize any momentum it manages to build up. The creature lets go of the ship all too easily, which prompts the characters to wonder if they are being baited for a greater trap. Nope, they just escape free and clear, no further attacks. The crew struggles to control an infected character, which strains relations between the character’s mother, his romantic interest, and the skipper. Will this lead to a schism involving a loose madman later on? Nope, the character abruptly dies before the argument about what to do with him is even over. One of the creature’s offspring is rapidly growing in the ship’s water tank. Should they kill it or, as the student insists, attempt to capture and release it? Neither. The creature escapes on its own before they can try either approach. And so on. It’s as if the film cannot stomach its own tension. This is really disappointing given the strength of the opening and the potential of the material.
TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:
For its release to streaming during the pandemic, Sea Fever was reframed as a work about the horrors of fighting to establish a quarantine. But that’s really only one of the film’s many quickly resolved subplots. Nevertheless, let’s discuss the doppelgänger as an infection by a parasitic species. Sea Fever does get the science right in one respect: how its parasite affects its hosts’ minds is in keeping with actual terrestrial parasites. Unlike the cosmic organism in Carpenter’s The Thing, it doesn’t simultaneously assimilate and mimic the host’s cells, nor does it supplant the host’s mind with its own independent identity, like a puppeteer-type symbiote or a demon. Rather, it causes its hosts to generate neuro-active chemicals that create a desire to carry out certain actions, e.g. to immerse oneself in water, that promote its own survival and reproduction. This is a dynamic seen in, for instance, parasitic wasps and the so-called “zombie fungus.” Consequently, Sea Fever’s characters become paranoid, such that they hyperscrutinize each other’s every behavioral quirk. Since the double within here is not a coherent and purposeful will but a biological process that alters one’s thinking, the characters become alienated from their own brains. (I’m mostly extrapolating here, since, again, the film only briefly develops this scenario before deflating it. Actually, a much better version of this same plot, which does explicitly delve into these questions, is The X-Files episode “Ice” (1993). Like Sea Fever, “Ice” is inspired by Carpenter’s The Thing but replaces the alien entity with a terrestrial organism based on actual parasites.) This gets to the root of the horror involved with the doppelgänger as an antagonistic aspect of the self: we are led to wonder if control over our own minds was only an illusion to begin with. If a parasite can influence our behavior by excreting natural chemicals, our behavior must already be controlled by chemicals native to our bodies. That doppelgänger consisting of the biological urge to procreate was there from the beginning, pulling our strings and merely letting us believe that our minds were ever our own.
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