The sea is big business in horror right now, from the ocean-adjacent but dripping-in-brine nightmare of The Lighthouse to the claustrophobic indie shocker Harpoon, and even the big-budget blockbuster Underwater, which stars Kristen Stewart as a Ripley-esque scientist battling against terrifyingly tentacular creatures. Sea Fever, the latest feature from Irish writer-director Neasa Hardiman (whose most recent work, curiously enough, found her directing a handful of episodes of Marvel’s Jessica Jones and Inhumans), actually incorporates elements from all three movies. Though entirely its own beast, the film has the spirit of John Carpenter and the soul of traditional Sean-nós stories, albeit with a darkly expedient and resolutely downbeat twist. 

Hermione Corfield portrays the heroine Siobhán, a shy research assistant forced into a sojourn on a grimy trawler by her well-meaning professor. She doesn’t like people and would rather keep to herself, standing back and observing because that’s what she’s good at. Indeed, Siobhán foregoes dinner with the crew, claiming not to be hungry, in order to eat alone in her bunk, bulky research texts as her only company. There’s another issue with poor Siobhán being coerced aboard this boat: she’s a redhead. According to sea-faring lore, redheads are bad luck. So, naturally, when things start to go awry, the finger is pointed squarely at the outsider. Even excluding Siobhán’s supposedly unlucky presence, tensions mount as the skipper intentionally sails into a no-go area to ensure the catch of the day is theirs and only theirs. And what’s that massive thing lurking just below them on the scanner?

Sea Fever establishes early on that everything about being aboard a rickety old ship like the Niamh Chinn Óir (named after a famous character in Irish mythology) is potentially dangerous, whether it’s getting cut by ropes, drinking contaminated water (Siobhán is offered a can of Carling, which is even worse) or plunging into the depths below. The water is shot as though it’s always about to encroach on the ship, almost like it’s a predator in itself. Its presence is foreboding, even before the walls start leaking green ooze and the crew realizes something is clinging to the vessel. The unearthly goop doesn’t take over the ship, though. Rather, it cleverly clings to areas where nobody will notice it, like the bottom of shoes, leaving a stripe of sickly color in its wake. Where it comes from won’t be spoiled here, but suffice to say this stuff is about quality rather than quantity. 

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Sea Fever is a creature feature at its core, and the massive, jellyfish-tentacled creature — barely glimpsed, as all the scariest monsters are — is brilliantly rendered by top-notch VFX. Hardiman takes her cues from classics like Jaws and The Thing, establishing early on that it’s the crew who poses the biggest threat to each other rather than anything lurking just outside their periphery. There’s a real grit and a texture to everything, particularly in one moment of ocular trauma-based body horror (the most gruesome the movie gets), which feels doubly disgusting because of the wet filth leaking out from the screen. Sea Fever’s doomed voyage believably strands its characters at sea, rather than in a massive tank with fluffy robes just out of shot. Likewise, the body count is impressively high for a movie with little in the way of gore or violence, again recalling the best that’s come before (Underwater is similarly ruthless in how it picks characters off one by one, albeit in a less considered manner, as befitting its blockbuster credentials).