Mermaid (2025) opens, perhaps deceivingly, on someone living the high life. It certainly looks like the high life at least: here’s a guy, on a yacht, sipping a chilled cocktail and listening to music. It’s textbook high life. The fact that this is a post-divorce celebration mars things slightly, but mainly that happens when a strange noise on board prompts him to investigate, armed. Armed? Expecting pirates? It’s weirder than that: what he quite literally uncovers in one of his lifeboats is a living, breathing mermaid.
We have to wait awhile to see and think about this more clearly as we get more fully into this ‘love letter to Florida’, as the film’s credits declare it. We meet our protagonist, who is emphatically not the rich guy on the boat. Doug (Johnny Pemberton) is an aquarium cleaner at a pole dancing club, or at least he is for a few minutes of screen time before he gets fired. He’s ‘weird’. People often use that adjective to describe Doug. He is, however, a gentle, pliant sort of weird, the kind of weird which enjoys necking prescription medication more than most other things; the kind of weird with no career arc and an increasingly troubled relationship with his young daughter Layla (the excellent Devyn McDowell). Oh, and he owes money to some ne’er-do-wells, who knew his equally ne’er-do-well dad. This builds and builds to what must surely be a crescendo: Doug getting tough; Doug getting out; Doug finding some kind of way forward. Well, his first plan fails – of course it fails – but he encounters the (now injured) mermaid, and decides to take her home.
Daryl Hannah, this is not (and by the way, there’s some great SFX work here by Trudie Storck and Monique McLoughlin). There are no beguiling smiles, no sense of gratitude, and thinking about mermaid tropes, there’s certainly no shell brassiere or coral jewellery (though we do see that referenced elsewhere – the film is very assured at adding little visual clues throughout its runtime). If we’re talking precedents, this mermaid much more closely resembles Medusa as imagined by Ray Harryhausen, right down to the way she drags herself forward on her hands, and she drags herself forward on her hands because she is not very friendly – not very friendly at all. This doesn’t stop Doug, who prefers all things from the sea anyway, taking her under his wing. Helping her recuperate could well be the making of him.
At a deeper level, we begin to glean that Doug’s behaviour stems from sadness and grief that he, in his willing fugue state, has never really dealt with. In this, we see that Doug’s a mess, but a modern, relatable mess, struggling to make sense of his life path whilst getting pummelled by circumstance. His choice to dose himself with Percocet is frustrating but understandable, allowing him to swan along in a state of well-meaning perplexity as life threatens from the sidelines. Pemberton does a great job with the role, looking authentically young and naïve throughout. Just as Doug uses drugs to take the edges off, so the film, too, feels like it has had its edges taken off, sanded down to a surprisingly gentle pace, edited to skip past any high action and violence for the most part and concerned more with the human aftermath. It’s a languid story which goes from the ridiculous to the sublime; it does contain moments of splattery gore and has some nastier connotations, but these are few. As much as the strange cryptid moves the story along, really this is Doug’s odyssey.
Made by Tyler Cornack, director of the perhaps even more idiosyncratic Butt Boy (2019), Mermaid is a strange love letter to the sunshine state but given that state’s reputation for, shall we say, eccentricity – it works. In the seemingly perpetual sunshine, we follow a fragile, sympathetic lead faced with a bizarre situation. It’s a charming and compelling story, more bittersweet than overtly funny (though it has its moments) but at its heart, it’s a film all about finding meaning and purpose in a mean maze of a world.
Mermaid (2025) received its world premiere at SXSW.