'Mermaid' Review: This Fishy, Florida-Set Horror-Comedy Flounders Early and Often

5 days ago 8

Published Apr 9, 2026, 3:18 PM EDT

Luna Guthrie is a Movie Features Editor for Collider, writer and film critic. She began as a writer for Collider in 2021 and joined the editorial team in 2024. She has a bachelor's degree in Humanities and Creative Writing.

Luna is a lifelong film geek and horror fan with a love of anything 1970s, especially in film - the grainier, the better!

When not watching movies or reading and writing about them, Luna loves making clothes from vintage patterns, going to the theater, reading the memoirs of interesting people and attending horror conventions. She would have been a hanger-on of the LA glam rock scene, but since she was born forty years too late, she settled for writing.

There are few greater sins a movie can commit than to be so nondescript, characterless, and lacking in substance that it just ends up being boring. This critic can muster a compliment for almost any motion picture, and, admittedly, I do have one or two half-hearted ones to offer writer/director Tyler Cornack's Mermaid. But despite an inviting premise, strong cast, and alleged horror-comedy leanings, the film is not horrific, it is not comedic, and it somehow makes watching a guy fall for a monstrous sea-creature tedious.

What Is 'Mermaid' About?

Johnny Pemberton, whose work I absolutely adored in the sitcom Superstore, stars as Doug, a simpleton fishkeeper living on the Florida coast and managing to be the world's least noticeable drug addict. His life sucks, his young daughter hates him, and when he loses his job maintaining the massive decorative fish tank in a local strip club, all hope seems lost. He heads out on a boat, with the meat-headed idea of putting a flare gun, in his mouth when he notices the wounded body of a mermaid (played by Avery Potemri) floating by. He takes her home, names her Destiny, and keeps her in his bathtub, regularly sedating her with drugged fish ... and that's kind of it. At one point, he gets the ridiculous idea to dress her up in a very unconvincing disguise and take her to his daughter's birthday party, where havoc ensues in a manner that seems to be going for gross-out comedy but is just one example of the movie's desperate floundering. It remains lost between genres and without any real direction or momentum, which makes for a really frustrating watch.

You'd think that a guy finding a mermaid — and this is the disgusting, humanoid, scaly kind; not the sexy, seashell-bra kind — and adopting her into his life would set in motion a chain of events that would be fun to watch. But the only way that the movie manages to finally get this ball rolling is when two characters randomly decide to break into Doug's place for absolutely no reason and just happen upon her. It then tries to go in a crime-thriller direction, but, by this point, all my interest was well and truly sleeping with the fishes. It's barely 100 minutes, but Mermaid drags its fins and gives us no horror or comedy to sink our teeth into.

'Mermaid's Strong Cast Gets Lost in a Bad Movie

Kirk Fox and Johnny Pemberton in Mermaid

I cannot tell you how much I adore Johnny Pemberton. His side character, Bo, played as a weedy white guy who desperately wants to be the biggest, baddest gangsta, is one of Superstore's most consistently hilarious figures, and Pemberton's penchant for playing the lovable idiot is one you'd hope would be put to good use in Mermaid. He sure does try, but the script he's given to work with is not only boring but borders on creepy at times, preventing Doug from feeling like that harmless dolt that he should. He might actually be something of a predator, just a really inept one. The uncomfortable injections of comedy that the movie goes for hold us back emotionally from the character, and in this harsh world of drugs, crime, and familial fracture, we desperately need a good guy to cling onto. His later displays of utter disregard and immaturity as a parent seal the deal, ensuring we can never really root for this guy or empathize with his loneliness, because he seems to inflict it upon himself.

Meanwhile, Robert Patrick is floating around as Ron, a gangster with an idiot son and friendly ties to Doug's deceased father. This old family connection seems to be the only thing tethering the men together, and Ron openly detests the young man, physically harming him on several occasions. Patrick is another reliable actor who has dove head-first into character acting to prove his range ever since his career-defining role as the terrifying T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and this is another such role for him. It's nothing special, and he doesn't seem terribly inclined to make it so, but his very presence is a welcome reprieve from all the mediocrity going on, if nothing else. With a tighter script, I would love to have seen Patrick and Pemberton go head-to-head, but this movie does neither any favors.

A Love Letter to Florida That Doesn't Feel Too Loving

A man in scuba gear underwater in Mermaid

The movie opens with a title card declaring it a "love letter to Florida," and perhaps native Floridians will recognize in it characteristics that are unmistakably of the state and find themselves in on the joke. But for all the sun, sea, and buzzing energy that Florida is known for, Mermaid doesn't capture it very alluringly. It's a prominent place in pop culture, and its many sides have been evocatively portrayed in film over the years. The Birdcage gave us a very sparkly, colorful, vibrant Miami. Monster presented Daytona Beach as a rough, grungy hub of bikerdom. Hell, even the myriad cheapy shark movies have done an okay job of capturing the carefree, sunny vibe that Florida stories tend to go for, but Mermaid doesn't really make much use of its surroundings. Sure, we get water, boats, and strip clubs, and Patrick sports a heavily sun-damaged complexion and plenty of Hawaiian shirts. But there's not much about this movie that screams Florida to me. It could really take place in any coastal town or state and have about the same impact.

The one saving grace of Mermaid is the thoroughly disgusting effects makeup by Trudie Storck. It's gross to look at, and takes a basic humanoid canvas and adorns it with a mixture of both aquatic and reptilian characteristics. Long fangs, scaly skin, and barnacle-like growths are the name of the game with this mermaid, making Doug's supposedly platonic but still totally sexual attraction to her all the weirder. She remains a complete non-character, more of a macguffin that somehow manages to set almost no events in motion, so there is no real relationship built between the two. If nothing else, Doug uses her so he can just pretend someone is listening to him. Potemri as the titular fish lady makes a good monster out of weak material, and I'm sure it was a fun and memorable character for her to play (if perhaps a physically uncomfortable one).

I imagine there are a select few out there whose taste in comedy earnestly leans towards the likes of dadaism, and they might find actual humor in this almost anti-comedic story. There are perhaps a few more who will get the odd sensible chuckle out of the movie and forget it ever existed within a month. But, for me, Mermaid was a painful viewing experience — a film that has the ingredients that could have made for a hearty and flavorful dish but ends up offering little more than empty film calories.

Mermaid is now playing in select theaters.