The King's Daughter (2022)

The King's Daughter arrives roughly eight years after it was shot, which is a long time for a mermaid to hold her breath. Sean McNamara directs Pierce Brosnan as Louis XIV, a monarch who learns that immortality can be carved out of a sea creature's heart, and Kaya Scodelario as Marie-Josèphe, the illegitimate daughter raised in a convent and brought to Versailles under thin pretenses. Chinese financing accounts for Fan Bingbing in the role of the mermaid, a piece of casting arithmetic that the film never bothers to justify or explain. The ensemble is international by way of the budget. Nobody in the screenplay asks us to notice, and so we do not.

Marie-Josèphe is a spirited girl who refuses an arranged marriage, defies her royal father, and saves a sentient creature through sheer stubbornness. This is fairy-tale empowerment of an old-fashioned sort, the kind that requires no theory to enjoy and makes no argument beyond its own plot. The mermaid's otherness is a matter of species, not of race or identity, and the film treats it as a theological puzzle rather than a social one. There is no romance between women, no commentary on difference beyond the obvious, and no interest in the body except as a vessel for injury and miraculous repair.

The nearest thing to a sermon comes from Père La Chaise, who argues that a creature capable of thought is one of God's creations and should not be butchered for a king's vanity. It is a plea for mercy, brief and theological, spoken by a man in a cassock to a man in a crown. The king's self-interest earns a mild rebuke, though the objection is moral and religious, never economic. The result is a muddled fantasy that sat on a shelf for the better part of a decade and emerged exactly as tired as that sounds. The mermaid swims home. The audience, presumably, does the same.