This is an intimate film with grand ideas, a small boat floating on a giant ocean, and the extraordinary discovery at the heart of the narrative is outweighed by the sense as a filmgoer that we’re seeing a talented director coming to the surface, sticking her tendrils in, and reshaping our expectations as we’re taken along for the journey.

The initial draw of Sea Fever might be as a monster movie, but this is a profoundly humane and humanist film whose ideas stays with you longer than the nightmares.

Despite some overly literal tributes to the films that inspired it (namely Alien, Jaws, and The Thing), Sea Fever’s vision of humanity’s insignificance in the face of nature is exactly the sort of awe-inspiring message some of us need to hear right now.

And suddenly, amid the claustrophobic compositions and shadowy hallways and tick-tick-tick of inevitable sickness, Sea Fever goes from being a monster movie to an eerily timed example of pandemic horror. Coming to a TV screen in a near you in the middle of a quarantine, this exercise in it-came-from-below suddenly takes on a whole other level of resonance.

It’s well-acted and reasonably intelligent, but also derivative enough to compare unfavorably to plenty of stone-cold classics.