Mermaid myths often cast men as lost souls transforming their longing into intimacy with the half-human creatures emerging from the waters around them. Tyler Cornack’s third feature, Mermaid, relocates that fantasy to the strange backwaters of sun-scorched Florida. The writer-director’s self-described “love letter” to the Sunshine State offers an inventive, off-kilter spin on the myth, doubling as a commentary on the loneliness of emotionally stunted American men who think wanting love entitles them to it.
Doug (John Pemberton), who barely sees his daughter (Devyn McDowell) and is openly hated by his ex (Nancy McCrumb), is a lethargic Floridian drifting between odd jobs. Fish are the closest thing he has to companions, as he spends his days cleaning an aquarium at a strip club. When a love poem to a dancer costs him his job, he finds himself truly unmoored. After choosing to end things at sea, he discovers a mermaid (Avery Potemri) that isn’t the seductress of folklore or Splash’s charming Madison, but a creature that’s altogether more horrifying.
Doug is desperate to love the reptilian sea monster he names Destiny, despite her iridescent scales and propensity to spew inky black bile. Theirs is a one-sided romance, with Doug trying to keep Destiny’s violent instincts at bay with Percocet. Mermaid’s humor is largely indirect, built on the contrast between the story’s escalating absurdity and Doug’s earnestness, played up deftly by Pemberton. Even after Destiny derails his daughter’s birthday party by spewing bile, Doug still defends the relationship. This leads to the funniest (and most tragic) moment in the film, where Doug’s family stages an intervention and he responds with the baffled conviction of someone who genuinely believes there’s nothing wrong with loving a grotesque mermaid.
The delirium intensifies in the pulpy third act, after a leathery Floridian named Ron Bocca (Robert Patrick) kidnaps Destiny. The tonal clash between Doug’s unwavering devotion to the mermaid and the ludicrously rising stakes of the story becomes the film’s central comic engine. Production designer Allie Leone and costume designer Sara Lukaszewski built Mermaid’s world out of a particular kind of Floridian nightmare, and in a landscape of swamp heat, dolphin-carved porches, cargo shorts, and garish colors, the film’s absurdity barely registers as such.
Mermaid is at once a creature feature, tragic romance, and stoner drama. Ultimately, though, Cornack positions it as a lo-fi spiritual fable about a man’s need to be cared about. In this way, the film sits between Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which also sees an improbable human-non-human bond as a cure for longing, and Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl, in which Ryan Gosling’s character falls in love with a life-sized doll. Mermaid, like Gillespie’s film, earnestly regards a man’s peculiar attachment, refusing to see romantic salvation as an illusion.
Mermaid’s performances are spotty, and its script can feel shaggy around the edges, wanting for tighter pacing. Yet the film’s languid pacing also mirrors Doug’s suspended existence. Scenes linger as his absent mind wanders. Cornack allows the odd rhythms to accumulate slowly, keying us to how Doug is stuck between fantasy and self-recognition. Ultimately, Mermaid shows how loneliness can un-anchor a person, and it makes you understand how any lost sailor might fall for the first thing, no matter what it is, that breaks it.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
