By now, those of us predisposed to looking at a scary thing through the lens of fiction have probably already rewatched Contagion and Outbreak, maybe reread The Andromeda Strain or Station Eleven. (The latter manages a ragged, longview hope for culture’s survival—read it!) We’ve definitely reconsidered the parasite terror of The Thing as it relates to the coronavirus here and now. So we’re perhaps in search of something else—yet another paranoid bit of quarantine panic to help put some borders around our worry.

Which means that the new VOD release Sea Fever (available now) has arrived at an accidentally fortuitous time. Here’s a fresh iteration of the same old claustrophobic anxiety: something infects a group of people who suddenly cannot trust their own bodies. The film, from Irish writer-director Neasa Hardiman, uses plenty of familiar tropes to tell its bitter little story, but it puts some unique shading on them, arranging well-worn pieces into a grim drift toward the inevitable rather than a mad thrash to survive.

Sea Fever has as gloomy comportment. It takes place on a dreary fishing boat in the chilly North Atlantic, all drab earth tones and cold blue water. One of the few shocks of warm color is the bright red hair of Siobhán (promising newcomer Hermione Corfield), a young research scientist who’s embedded with the trawler crew to study deep sea activity while they go about their fishing. That red hair is viewed as a bad omen by the superstitious fishermen and women, including financially struggling captain Freya (Connie Nielsen) and her haggard partner in life and business, Gerard (Dougray Scott). Perhaps they were right to be wary, as not long into their voyage they encounter an aquatic phenomenon that stops their boat dead in its tracks. And then, rather alarmingly, begins to seep into the ship.

This is a sea creature movie, but one quite unlike the recent Underwater, a loud macro thriller that gets lost out in the dark of the ocean floor. Sea Fever takes a quieter, more contemplative as its strange entity—glowing with eerie bioluminescent beauty—besieges the ship. Hardiman knows that a significant portion of her audience will be watching for some body horror, and she eventually delivers the bloody stuff, in blunt and gruesome fashion. But much of her film is gentler than the squish it’s sorrowful, morose, as Siobhán and the crew begin to realize not that they have an enemy to fight, but that they’ve already lost to it.

That’s a pretty depressing sentiment to confront right now. But there’s something cathartic about Sea Fever’s lonely sink, the way it slowly shrugs its shoulders and lets nature take its annihilating course. Which isn’t to say that we in the real world should follow its model—we’re dealing with an opportunistic virus, not an animal trying to stay alive in its own environment. Still, Sea Fever’s perspective is a kind of refreshing, operating from a place of solemn, realistic understanding rather than brash, witless defiance.

All that said, I do wish the film got its energy up just a little bit. The somber mood and shaggy performances give the movie texture, but not much vim. Hardiman also needs to individuate her ideas more, flesh them out past the simple mimicry of Alien and The Thing’ and the more recent alien chiller Life. (That last one is a brutal and surprisingly artful movie that didn’t get its fair due upon its release. It’s worth a rent, but beware: it’s gnarly.) We can feel a richer idea tingling just beneath Sea Fever’s skin. But Hardiman never roots it out, opting instead for a restraint that is often admirable, but also dampens the film’s potential power.