Tina Kakadelis
To live in Florida is to experience some of the strangest things the world has to offer. Something about that odd little state down south creates a breeding ground for weirdness. One such occurrence is at the center of Tyler Cornack’s Mermaid. The film, which premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, is a fish-out-of-water tale mixed with a lonely Florida man’s attempt to find companionship. Doug is played by Johnny Pemberton, who was once a Florida man himself. He dedicates the film to the state where he spent his adolescence.
The mythos of Florida transcends the boundaries of the state. Mermaid has yet to play to an audience where it was shot, but its festival run took it to Germany, Sweden, Poland, and Texas. It’s such a misunderstood place, but Pemberton and Cornack comment on the warmth of the reception they’ve received around the globe.
“I think people enjoy Florida for the spectacle that it is, and the movie is definitely representative of that. It’s nice to hear people responding to it in such a positive way, being keen to go on the ride that is the movie in terms of all the colors and the madness that represent that state,” says Pemberton.
“It’s sort of like a postcard of Florida to me,” says Cornack. “Beyond the loneliness, it feels like the colors and the tone of everything I experienced as a kid. I think the whole point of the movie is that anything can happen in this place.”
Cornack’s thesis is eloquently summed up in a monologue toward the end of the film. A very rich man talks about how he’s gotten to travel around the world, do everything he could have dreamed about. He then says, “no matter how many places I’ve been, I always manage to come back to Florida. It’s the only place on earth that can still surprise me.”
Mermaids is full of surprises, but shockingly, it’s more reined in than Cornack’s first film, Butt Boy. That movie, about a man who’s able to absorb items of any size through his butthole, was what made Pemberton want to work with Cornack. In the years between Butt Boy and Mermaid, Cornack believes his directorial voice grew quite a bit and he sees Mermaid as a chance to keep his weirdness while exploring deep, human emotions.
“Mermaid is more about loneliness than it is about a mermaid,” smiles Cornack. “I think a lot of the humor is the same as Butt Boy. Same tone, just in a different world, a different setting.”
Upon first viewing, Mermaid is a wild ride through the pastel underbelly of St. Petersburg. Eccentric characters, strange hijinks, and dry humor are what stand out. Upon second viewing, though, Mermaid feels so much sadder than it initially appeared. Pemberton says “it gets sadder with every viewing.”
“I always knew it was dark, but it really felt like a tragedy after watching it for the first time in a year,” admits Cornack. “Not to get too personal, but when I was writing the screenplay, I was going through some stuff. I had a couple friends from Florida who passed away from drug addiction. I don’t even think I was aware when I was writing it that these losses were filtering their way through. Now I watch it and I’m like, oh, that’s undeniably what was happening, which is really interesting.”
As the title implies, a mermaid plays a large role in the film. Doug struggles to connect with humans, but deeply loves caring for fish, both at home and in the massive aquarium at the strip club where he works. It’s natural for him to care for this mermaid he discovers. After spending a few days together, he names her Destiny, almost as a way to justify keeping her in the bathtub. The universe conspired to make him care for her, so who is he to go against that?
“Doug is doing almost everything as a form of avoidance, which he’s really, really good at,” explains Pemberton. “He does not want to take responsibility or have to deal with some things. Why deal with something when you can just numb yourself to it?”
The mermaid is played by Avery Potemri in an extremely physical performance. Destiny is not your Disney mermaid. She’s something more akin to the creature from the Black Lagoon. Cornack estimates that 90–95% of the look of Destiny was practical. The only help from CGI was cleaning up a few things and adding the breathing gills to her neck. It’s a miracle there’s even a mermaid in the film because of a last-minute change in special effect houses.
“I was working with a company for a while leading up to the film and that fell through at the last minute,” recalls Cornack. “We got Mark Villalobos and his entire team here. What was four months of prep for the look of this thing became ten days. I didn’t even see the mermaid until our first day of shooting.”
“My whole concept with the movie is I wanted it to be real,” Cornack elaborates. “We know what the Disney mermaids and sirens look like, but what would it actually look like if you found it in the Gulf of Mexico or Tampa? I wanted it to be scary. I just wanted it to be an animal. I didn’t want it to be this mystic thing.”
Potemri’s performance as Destiny is fairly non-verbal. The mermaid doesn’t speak English, so much of her communication is growls and screeches. While Pemberton’s Doug does speak English, his performance is fairly silent as well. Doug is nervous and anxious about the world, and that translates to him not saying much at all.
“It was really hard to get into that character because it’s very different from me,” admits Pemberton. “I always want to fill the spaces. If you watch a podcast of mine, I’m in fast motion. I’m moving around all the time. I can’t sit still to save my life. Doug is the opposite.”
“It was also refreshing because it allowed me, when working with other actors in the movie, to enjoy their performances,” explains Pemberton. “I really loved playing this person who has a weird kind of confidence. I mean, he’s not confident because Doug is just so, so depressed and so high off those drugs, but he has a weird kind of confidence in his slowness. I really liked wearing that.”
There’s a great joke in 30 Rock about predicting the results of a presidential election, but struggling when it comes to Florida because each region is so different. St. Pete, where Mermaid takes place, is a different world than Orlando, which also has little in common with the panhandle. Should Cornack and Pemberton reunite to tell another Florida tale, they have different ideas of where the next film should take them.
“I think probably the Keys,” ponders Pemberton. “It’d be fun to do something down there. If not there, the opposite. Someplace in northern Florida in the woods. Where you’re not close to the ocean.”
“I’m really into the country club, gated community subculture,” says Cornack. “I think I touched a little bit on that in Mermaid, but there’s so much more to it. There are murders and men hiring hitmen to kill their wives and double murders…there’s a lot of fun stuff in that world as well.”
MERMAID will be In Select Theaters April 8!
