Last Updated on April 7, 2026 by Monica Castillo
Florida has been done to death as a setting the true crime podcasts, the meme accounts, the endless parade of headlines about men doing inexplicable things with animals and yet Mermaid finds something in it that still feels genuine. Maybe because Tyler Cornack actually seems to love the place. Not ironically, not as a punchline, but the way you love somewhere that embarrasses you. The film is soaked in that feeling. And for a while, it’s enough.
The setup is simple and genuinely strange: Doug, a drug-addicted loner played by Johnny Pemberton, gets fired early in the film, starts sliding toward rock bottom, and at some point in that slide discovers an injured mermaid. He decides, for reasons that feel more instinctive than rational, to take care of her. That’s the movie. What Cornack does with it is sometimes surprising, occasionally brilliant, and for longer stretches than the film can really afford pretty dull.
Cornack made Butt Boy and Tiny Cinema before this, two micro-budget films that established him as someone operating in genuine surrealism rather than the kind of carefully managed quirk that indie film sometimes mistakes for it. That background matters here, because the moments in Mermaid that really work the wild Florida Man situations, the absurdist detours, a horror-inflected opening that sets your expectations somewhere the rest of the film doesn’t quite go feel like they come from the same genuinely strange place. He’s not cosplaying weirdness. This is just how he thinks. That’s rarer than it sounds.
What he’s also done, and this is legitimately impressive, is made Florida look extraordinary. The whole film is saturated to the point of near-delirium greens that feel almost aggressive, light that sits heavy on every surface, color that makes the state feel less like a location and more like a condition. There’s something Matt Reeves did with Gotham in The Batman, making the city so visually specific it became a character in itself Mermaid does a version of that for Florida. You feel the humidity. You feel the heat pressing down. It’s the warmest-looking film I’ve seen in years, and that warmth does real work, because Pemberton’s Doug is carrying something much colder through all of it.
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That contrast the gorgeous, almost hallucinatory landscape against one man’s very unglamorous collapse is the film’s smartest structural instinct. Doug’s misery reads differently against all that color. He looks like someone the sun has been shining on for years without ever actually warming.
Pemberton is good, which almost makes things harder. He has the kind of loose, lived-in charm that you probably noticed in Fallout, where he seemed genuinely unbothered by the scale of the production around him. Here he’s working with something thornier Doug is the kind of guy whose problems are mostly self-made, and the film never quite decides whether that’s the point or a design flaw. You feel for him sometimes. Other times you watch him make another bad decision and feel something closer to exhaustion. Whether that’s honest characterization or just underwritten, I couldn’t fully tell you. Probably both.
Robert Patrick shows up and has a great time being exactly as gruff and unpredictable as you’d want Robert Patrick to be. Every scene he’s in moves faster. The film misses him when he’s gone.
Here’s what I kept running into watching Mermaid: the premise has real mythology underneath it. Sailors on long voyages losing their minds to mermaids, desire and destruction pulling them under that’s old, resonant stuff, and the idea of Doug as a modern, Florida-fried version of that lost sailor is right there in the material. You can see Cornack reaching for it. But the film never closes the distance between what it’s gesturing at and what it’s actually delivering. The emotional core, a broken man finding something worth protecting, should hit harder than it does. Instead it sits at a careful remove, interesting to think about but not quite alive to sit with.
That’s the honest problem with Mermaid. It’s not a bad film. It’s a frustrating one, which is different maybe worse, because a bad film doesn’t make you think about the better version you almost watched. This one does, pretty much the whole way through.
Violence & Intensity
There’s a low, uneasy kind of violence running through the film rather than anything explosive. The opening leans into horror imagery with an injured mermaid and some disturbing visuals around her condition, and that tone lingers even when the film drifts elsewhere. Doug’s downward spiral brings moments of tension erratic behavior, neglect, and situations that feel like they could turn dangerous at any second. Nothing is relentlessly graphic, but the atmosphere can get heavy, especially for younger viewers who might find the mix of realism and surreal elements unsettling.
Language: The language is consistent with the kind of character Doug is—rough, careless, and often self-destructive. Expect frequent profanity, casual swearing, and dialogue that feels lived-in rather than cleaned up. It’s not stylized or clever; it’s messy in a way that fits the film’s tone. There aren’t many targeted slurs, but the overall tone leans crude and unfiltered.
Sexual Content / Nudity: The film doesn’t lean heavily into explicit sexual content, but the premise itself carries an underlying sense of discomfort. Doug caring for a mermaid in isolation creates moments that feel intimate in a strange, ambiguous way. It’s less about overt sexuality and more about the tension between curiosity, vulnerability, and unhealthy attachment. There may be brief suggestive moments or partial nudity tied to the mermaid, but nothing framed as traditionally explicit.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Doug is introduced as a drug-addicted loner, and substance use is woven directly into his character and decisions. Drug use, alcohol consumption, and general self-destructive habits are shown without much glossing over. It’s not glamorized, but it’s also not heavily moralized—it just exists as part of his life, which may make it feel more real, but also more uncomfortable.
Age Recommendations: This is best suited for older teens and adults, roughly 16+ and up, depending on maturity. It’s not just the content, but the tone—slow, strange, and emotionally distant in places.
Mermaid opens in select theaters Wednesday, April 8.
