MERMAID Writer/Director Tyler Cornack Loves Florida, Man! – Interview

Everybody has a Florida story. Hell, I use it as an adjective. To describe something as “Florida” is to say that it defies categorization, reason, and/or logic. Tyler Cornack, the writer/director who brought you 2019’s Butt Boy, is back with his new film Mermaid, and it is very, very Florida.

It’s likely easy, with its nonsensical plot and subject matter, to dismiss Mermaid as silly and perverse. Whereas it is not categorically not either of those things, the film carries a depth that will likely fly under the radar of many casual viewers. After spending several days with the film, I continued to find weight in unlikely areas of the film as it death-rolled around in my mind, like a gator with its prey.

In almost every frame of Mermaid there’s subtext which deepens the audience’s immersion. It’s central character, Doug, portrayed with slack-jawed awe by the ubiquitous Johnny Pemberton (Prime Video’s Fallout), is as alien to viewers as he is familiar. While the majority will shrink away from his many terrible decisions, many of us will find him tragically relatable – hopefully to an acquaintance outside our ourselves. Every time I watched Doug make another tragic misstep, I had to remind myself that the movie isn’t called “Doug,” and that’s not by accident.

Serving as both a love letter to Florida and a deeper meditation on addiction, Mermaid offers an uncomfortable, unflinching glance at worlds that exist just beyond our skin. Worlds filled with family friends that become nefarious dealers, family that become strangers, and supernatural elements that become more familiar to us than those who share our blood. Mermaid is at once familiar and perverse, taking elements of our reality that we think we understand and crackling it through the dark mirror that is Florida.

Robert Patrick (HBO’s Peacemaker), the T-1000 himself, steals every scene he’s in with a flushed face of intense, drug-fueled lunacy. Kevin Nealon is measured and metered out in small doses, a far cry from his more ludicrous characters. Tom Arnold is there, too, as a nation’s analog to the aftermath of disastrous relationships across time, and finally Kevin Dunn cameos in the most subversive role I’ve seen him play to date. If you think you know where Mermaid is going at any given moment, you’re likely to be pleasantly surprised.

Well, maybe not pleasantly.

I had the chance to chat with writer/director Tyler Cornack and praise his zany vision, discuss practical effects, working with such a stellar cast, and the phenomenon of dinosaurs in our own background. And I wasn’t afraid to ask the hard questions, either. Spoiler alert: I did ask if Gator fucked the mermaid.

Mermaid made its debut at last year’s SxSW festival and has now found distribution through Utopia Pictures. The film opens in select theaters Wednesday, April 8th in North America. While Google lists the film as horror/action, this writer finds it to be neither, but rather an oddly sweet drama with a nasty streak. If you liked 2015’s Polish musical/horror The Lure and thought The Little Mermaid needed more drugs and body horror, Mermaid is the film for you. It is, in a word, Florida.

Have you checked this movie out? Let us know your thoughts.