Mermaid (2025) claims to be a “love letter to Florida.” Floridians shouldn’t expect their own Midnight in Paris. This film is closer to Leaving Las Vegas or Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant vis-a-vis Sin City and NOLA, respectively.
Mentioning Mermaid in the same conversation as those two movies may not be a compliment to the Sunshine State, but it certainly is flattering to writer-director Tyler Cornack. While nowhere near as good, Mermaid is by no means bad. More importantly, it could be better, meaning there’s both room and potential for improvement.
The film is well shot and was well scouted before that. However fantastical, what happens undoubtedly takes place in Florida. It’s nice to see a mermaid movie that’s not only grounded in the reality of actual geographical locations but also depicts the titular creature as what it for all intents and purposes is: a “fucking fish.”
Destiny (Avery Potemri), as Doug (Johnny Pemberton) calls her, is ugly as sin, but her ugliness is brought to life through prosthetic makeup and performance — another breath of fresh air.
Speaking of air and breathing, the movie scores big in visual presentation but neglects the biology. It’s not that gill-bearing animals can’t survive out of the water; it’s that, as far as I can tell, the script doesn’t mention that certain species of fish can, albeit not for long. If the stakes of Destiny’s continued stay on dry land were made clearer, it would help cement the toxicity of Doug’s character — assuming that’s the point.
Although he professes to care about Destiny, Doug doesn’t seem aware that he may be doing her more harm than good by keeping her in his apartment and wheeling her to kiddie birthday parties. His negligence is doing a lot of thematic work. In this satirical subversion of Splash, Destiny looks like a monster but she’s the victim; meanwhile, ostensibly harmless oddball Doug is an emotional vampire.
Once that becomes apparent, it reframes the dynamic between Doug and his ex-wife, Tina (Julia Valentine Larson). Tina is initially portrayed as a stereotypical nagging ballbuster; however, the more we know Doug, the more we sympathize with Tina.
Instead of the existential threat to Destiny coming from her forced change of habitat, the screenplay has her re-kidnapped by Robert Patrick so that Doug can rescue her before Kevin Dunn can eat her alive — an outlandish development even for a film about a cryptid.
Actually, the climax is theoretically reminiscent of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and it could have been similarly effective in practice had it been handled with the unflinching gaze of Peter Greenaway. Cornack is no Greenaway and botches both the setup and the execution.
Rather than showing us an unequivocal shot of someone eating someone who has been thoroughly cooked, he shows us a close-up of a fork digging into what I presume is Destiny’s tail, causing it to spurt computer-generated blood, followed by a reaction shot of Destiny. This raises the question of why Kevin Dunn is eating her raw — and not even sushi-raw but raw-raw. He complains that she’s “chewy” and tastes “like shit,” but then what did he expect?
This whole thing would have been more spectacular if Destiny had been properly deep fried, and more dramatic if Doug showed up to save her before she’s served. The latter would have allowed Cornack to retain the happy ending. I know it’s a happy ending because Doug smiles a cautiously optimistic smile before the screen fades to black. There isn’t much indication that he has had an epiphany and seen the error of his ways, but I guess that could be implied.
As for Destiny, we learn even less about her than we do about Doug. I believe less is more, and I understand that mystery is part of the allure of a mysterious creature. Still, Destiny is never not a fish out of water, and we never get to observe her in her natural habitat. It’s probably better that way, though, as that would have likely led to more shoddy CGI — which, even though is kept to a minimum, remains the film’s Achilles tail fin.
Before he dies, Dunn’s character has a speech the gist of which is that Florida is a strange, unpredictable place where anything can happen. I dunno. I’ve never been to Florida and even I know it must have a lot more to offer than shady, morally corrupt, emotionally defective creeps and strip joints. On the other hand, the fact that Cornack chose it as the setting of a mostly decent little flick — something most places are unable to brag about lately — is perhaps the greatest show of affection.
