Mermaid

Tyler Cornack's *Mermaid* arrives from SXSW as a piece of swamp-soaked surrealism about a Percocet-addled Floridian who discovers a wounded mermaid and proceeds to make her the center of his deteriorating universe. It is, by the available evidence, a film about addiction, loneliness, and the particular human talent for building a mythology around whatever we happen to be clutching at the time. The social consciousness reading is, to put it charitably, a stretch. The film does not appear to have received the memo that cinema in the current era is supposed to illuminate systemic failures and foreground underrepresented voices. It is too busy being strange.

The "Florida Man" framing is itself an act of mild cultural counter-programming. Cornack reportedly intends the setting as a celebration of Florida's contradictions, its larger-than-life inhabitants, and its specific brand of humid, sun-bleached human wreckage. This is not the language of progressive social architecture. It is the language of someone who finds the grotesque genuinely beautiful, which places the film firmly in a lineage that runs through John Waters and out the other side. Waters, it should be noted, has praised Cornack's previous work. This tells us a great deal about the film's spiritual address.

On our ten-point scale of contemporary progressive sensibilities, *Mermaid* registers as approximately ambient. The mermaid is a passive object of obsession, not an empowered aquatic subject. The protagonist is a white man in crisis, treated with pathos rather than critique. The Florida setting is celebrated, not interrogated. The addiction is portrayed as tragedy, not as a neurodivergent identity deserving affirmation. In a cultural moment that rewards films for their legible social messaging, *Mermaid* appears to have wandered in from a different decade entirely, clutching a wounded fish-woman and asking no one in particular what it all means. We find this, on balance, refreshing.