Mermaid

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...

Writer and director Tyler Cornack's MERMAID is one of the oddest and most satisfying romance-horror films ever made, making a convincing argument that when it comes to mermaid films, there is more than enough room for this to sit alongside Ron Howard's SPLASH (1984) and Guillermo del Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017).

Set along Florida's west coast, Cornack's film — in a similar setup to Howard's and del Toro's films — centers around perennial loser Doug Nelson (played to perfection by Johnny Pemberton), who stumbles across an injured mermaid at the lowest point in his life in the Gulf of Mexico.

Pemberton's depiction of Doug's crippling loneliness is what elevates the film from mere macabre art-house fare into a genuine exploration of companionship and love.

Cornack's film has not made that task very easy — there is no statuesque Daryl Hannah cavorting across the screen semi-nude — but rather a feral and horrifying mermaid creature Doug fondly names "Destiny" (Avery Potemri). Huge praise here for the practical effects behind the creature's design.

As Doug cares for Destiny, his personal life continues to spin wildly out of control, both with his ex-wife and young daughter, and especially with the loan sharks his drug habit has spawned — the latter played by Robert Patrick and Tyler Rice. Patrick, in particular, turns in a wonderfully over-the-top performance as an opportunistic loan shark who seems to regard Doug's desperation as little more than another business opportunity.

Cinematographer Joe Lavold captures the sweaty, humid grime of Florida with its purple and green neon luminescence. The result is that Florida becomes more and more its own character rather than simply a backdrop for the film.

Co-starring Kevin Nealon and Kevon Dunn, it is Pemberton's performance that ultimately gives MERMAID its beating heart. There is something surprisingly tender beneath all of Cornack's grotesque imagery and dark humor, much in the same way...