A mermaid is ripped from the Pacific, her tail is chopped off and she’s thrown into a mental home where no one believes she is a mermaid.

Mermaid Down (2019) sort of tells a story: two sailors believe that there are mermaids out in the sea and, during a small discussion over coffee with a toy tea-set, embark in their short but vivid adventure. They catch a big one, but it sets itself free and takes one of them on a ride to the bottom of the sea. On a second try, with only one sailor left, he catches the mermaid (Alexandra Bokova) again and straps the tail to a hook so it can’t escape like the first time. At certain distance, Dr. Beyer (Burt Culver), is watching everything from his boat and jumps to water to get closer to the sailor’s boat. Once on the boat, Dr. Beyer witnesses how the sailor cuts the mermaid in half to separate the fish from the human, and later takes the mermaid for himself and kills the remaining sailor. If you’ve read this far, these are only the first 15 minutes of the film. After that, it involves a psychiatric house for troubled girls, a ghost, an underground house of horrors, a pit bull, a pond, a censored bloodbath, and a yacht with hidden skeletons in the most awkward and unthreaded way possible.

Mermaid Down, despite being a horror fantasy film, has its moments in which it can be classified as a satirical comedy. However, this does not save it from sinking into a 90-minute sea of ​​errors. Despite being a film where fantastic elements stand out from the natural ones, there is a lack of coherence in the way these are presented. For example (spoiler alert), there is a ghost that apparently only two people have the ability to communicate with. In the end, the reason why only some characters have interaction with it is revealed, but it is never detailed why the ghost sometimes recognizes being dead or why it can move objects but it cannot float through walls. In the same way, it is inexplicable how the mermaid has an impressive force to break a person’s bones but that same force vanishes when it comes to ripping a rope. Or why the villain returns twice for revenge after their esophagus and chest were torn apart. The film leaves many doubts as it progresses, in the same way that it lets live many unnecessary characters…

The worst part of a film is having several characters that weren’t properly profiled with a purpose; there are so many characters in Mermaid Down that their existence is merely for having extras rather than crucial elements that can save or seal their fates. The interests and motives of each character change in each new scene. But, despite of its sin, Bokova’s participation as the mermaid must be highlighted; she seems to have made the greatest effort to keep the film afloat, not pun intended, with the mannerisms of her character since it has no verbal ability to do so.

On a positive note, the soundtrack is nice; it’s very big for an average production. It’s believable that the music is better than the movie and it compensates a lot on the mix-and-match storyline it involves. Also, it’s nice to see a side where mermaids are lethal creatures and not just beauties that sing and wish to have legs so they can walk among humans or lure pirates into their impending doom. Also, hats of to the director for an amazing job on the photography; every scene is very well captured through the lense and is unique in each act of the film.

Mermaid Down remains underwater with such a complicated, rather than complex, story. The plot is clear from the beginning but, despite having a good idea poorly executed, it seems that the screenwriter had the vision to develop four untimely and unnecessarily stories in one.