Once you get past its note of emo-mawkishness, there’s something disquieting and poignant (and rather prescient) about this doomed love story of the future, from director Chad Hartigan and taken from a short story by Los Angeles author Aja Gabel.

Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell) are a young couple living in an America ravaged by a pandemic causing memory loss. The disease has been causing planes to crash, because pilots suddenly forget how to fly, and marathon competitors to keep on running into the night because they’ve forgotten they’re supposed to stop. The couple’s best friends have been hit by the disease, and Emma and Jude are now themselves anxiously monitoring each other for the first signs of forgetfulness, and trying to hoard their romantic memories (so recently made) against the great forthcoming oblivion.

Little Fish has obvious echoes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, though its purpose is to brood more statically on the nature of memory and love. Sometimes it tries the patience, just a little. But it’s a film that is in tune with the Covid age, and it plugs in to one of the great contemporary issues: dementia.

The spectacle of young people suffering memory loss is a bold narrative strategy whose effect is to remind you that the old are not a separate, lesser tribe who somehow don’t deserve to avoid dementia: everyone is equal, young and old, and old people feel the agony of dementia as much as young people would (and sometimes do, in early-onset cases). O’Connell – a very good actor of whom I feel I haven’t seen enough recently – is tender and sympathetic as Jude, and Cooke is similarly intelligent and gentle as Emma.

• Little Fish is released on 10 May on digital platforms.