Genre-bending ‘Mermaid’ is filmmaker’s ‘love letter to Florida’
May 5, 2026 at 5:00 AM EDT
Mermaid, which is screening Wednesday and Thursday (May 6 and 7) at the Beach Theatre, is Tampa-bred writer/director Tyler Cornack’s third film.
The title character in Tyler Cornack’s Mermaid isn’t beautiful, and she doesn’t long to turn into a human, through song or otherwise. She doesn’t even speak. Forget all that movie mermaid stuff.
Destiny, as the film’s protagonist dubs her, is more fish than person, more mer than maid. She has gills in her neck and pointy, carnivore teeth. She makes guttural sounds, and she tends to spew gooey black projectile vomit when she feels threatened.
Mermaid, which is screening Wednesday and Thursday (May 6 and 7) at the Beach Theatre, is Tampa-bred writer/director Cornack’s third film. It veers between comedy, drama, drug-soaked freakout and gory horror show.
Tyler Cornack was raised in Tampa. (209x300, AR: 0.6966666666666667)
“It’s a Florida movie to me, first,” Cornack tells the Catalyst. “It’s a hybrid of genres that jumps in and out. I would also call it a dark comedy before anything else. And then I would throw in the rest as ‘insert genre here.’
“There are elements of horror and thriller sprinkled throughout; it’s kind of all my favorite genres rolled into one crazy adventure.”
Mermaid was shot on St. Pete Beach in September and October 2023.
Johnny Pemberton (Fallout; Superstore) stars as Doug, a stoner who lives, aimlessly, in a beach house inherited from his late father. He talks to the fish in his aquarium, otherwise stumbling about in a haze of pills, cocaine and alcohol.
The story kicks into gear when he discovers a wounded mermaid (the damage was inflicted by a boater played, in a preamble, by Tom Arnold). He carries her home, lays her awkwardly in his bathtub, and feeds her small fish and Spaghetti-O’s. Always laced with drugs to keep her calm.
Doug has a young daughter with a woman he slept with exactly one time. He has, understandably, difficulty connecting with the girl. His preoccupation with the thing in his bathtub (which nobody else knows about) makes him even more distracted than usual.
Keaven Nealon (Saturday Night Live; Weeds) plays her well-meaning stepfather.
Doug’s discovery of Destiny also coincides with a confrontation with his drug dealer (Robert Patrick, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day), and things go from bad to worse.
“I think there’s a big difference between films and movies,” offers Cornack, who also composed the music. “This definitely leans more on the side of a film, to me. In a sense that there’s some personal stuff there, being I grew up in Florida, and really it’s like a character study.
“As far as it being scary, it’s very intentional. It’s going to be weird for people, and I think some people have to process it more than others. And there’s people who really, really get it and understand it, and there’s people who don’t understand it whatsoever.
“And those are my favorite kind of films.”
Executive producer (and cinematographer) on Mermaid was Billy Morean, whose Aunt Beth (of Morean Art Center fame) allowed her St. Pete Beach house to be used for Doug’s domicile.
“I met Bill in California years ago, in film school. He grew up there on the beach, and we went to his aunt’s house for his 30th birthday, 10 years ago. I saw that house and I was like ‘Man, we should do a movie here one day.’ I’ve always wanted to make a beach movie on the beach I grew up with.
“It’s a very personal story for him as well. He has so many memories in that house, and on that beach. And it’s very much our sensibilities humor-wise, too. We both have a very dry, f–ked-up sense of humor. So we jelled on that.”
(768x583, AR: 1.3173241852487136)
Another of the movie’s central locations is the 33,500-gallon aquarium at RumFish Grill, at the TradeWinds Resort. The tank, 13 feet deep, and the RumFish dining room stand in for the strip club where Doug works, and where at least one violent action scene takes place.
According to Cornack, the tank scenes were originally written to be lensed at Weeki Wachee, home of Florida’s “original” mermaids. “We tried,” he says. “And they were not into it.”
So, “There were a lot of changes that had to happen on the fly with a script like that. It’s always alive is what I like to say. It doesn’t stop changing.”
And the look of Destiny – who is “played” by actress Avery Potemri – morphed at the very last minute. “I was working with a team for a number of months, working on the creature design I wanted to do,” Cornack explains. “I was about to fly to go start filming the movie when the company I had been working with dropped out. So we had to find somebody the day before I left, a brand-new team to start from scratch.
“And this four-month thing became 10 days. We had to shift the whole shooting schedule around to build this new mermaid, which none of us knew was going to look like until the day we started shooting.”
The production generated a local spend of $750,000, according to Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, with cast and crew accounting for 900 hotel room nights during the filming.
Mermaid premiered in March at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Pemberton was in attendance when the Beach Theatre advance-screened the film April 18.
Cornack’s film opens with the words “A love letter to Florida.”
“I just think there’s so much more comedy, even if it’s dry, strange weird comedy, if this awkward guy is talking to an animal,” he says. “A feral animal. I think it speaks more to Florida. To me, it speaks more to the roadside attraction Florida thing. I just think it creates more comedy than if she was an attractive siren, sitting in a tub.”
Doug, the filmmaker stressed, is as desperately lonely as he is messed up. He, too, is a fish out of water.
“I feel like this guy has been locked away in his house for a number of years, and he’s really had nobody to speak to, and nobody to come check on him. Nobody’s been doing a wellness check on him, and he’s been locked in this house with his dad’s things.
“And he can’t really communicate the outside world, so lo and behold, this is why she’s called Destiny. He creates this version of Destiny in his head, because he finds something incredible. And the only things he cares about, and can relate to, are fish.”
Screenings are Wednesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. Find tickets here.
This content provided in partnership with StPeteCatalyst.com
Destiny, as the film’s protagonist dubs her, is more fish than person, more mer than maid. She has gills in her neck and pointy, carnivore teeth. She makes guttural sounds, and she tends to spew gooey black projectile vomit when she feels threatened.
Mermaid, which is screening Wednesday and Thursday (May 6 and 7) at the Beach Theatre, is Tampa-bred writer/director Cornack’s third film. It veers between comedy, drama, drug-soaked freakout and gory horror show.
Tyler Cornack was raised in Tampa. (209x300, AR: 0.6966666666666667)
“It’s a Florida movie to me, first,” Cornack tells the Catalyst. “It’s a hybrid of genres that jumps in and out. I would also call it a dark comedy before anything else. And then I would throw in the rest as ‘insert genre here.’
“There are elements of horror and thriller sprinkled throughout; it’s kind of all my favorite genres rolled into one crazy adventure.”
Mermaid was shot on St. Pete Beach in September and October 2023.
Johnny Pemberton (Fallout; Superstore) stars as Doug, a stoner who lives, aimlessly, in a beach house inherited from his late father. He talks to the fish in his aquarium, otherwise stumbling about in a haze of pills, cocaine and alcohol.
The story kicks into gear when he discovers a wounded mermaid (the damage was inflicted by a boater played, in a preamble, by Tom Arnold). He carries her home, lays her awkwardly in his bathtub, and feeds her small fish and Spaghetti-O’s. Always laced with drugs to keep her calm.
Doug has a young daughter with a woman he slept with exactly one time. He has, understandably, difficulty connecting with the girl. His preoccupation with the thing in his bathtub (which nobody else knows about) makes him even more distracted than usual.
Keaven Nealon (Saturday Night Live; Weeds) plays her well-meaning stepfather.
Doug’s discovery of Destiny also coincides with a confrontation with his drug dealer (Robert Patrick, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day), and things go from bad to worse.
“I think there’s a big difference between films and movies,” offers Cornack, who also composed the music. “This definitely leans more on the side of a film, to me. In a sense that there’s some personal stuff there, being I grew up in Florida, and really it’s like a character study.
“As far as it being scary, it’s very intentional. It’s going to be weird for people, and I think some people have to process it more than others. And there’s people who really, really get it and understand it, and there’s people who don’t understand it whatsoever.
“And those are my favorite kind of films.”
Executive producer (and cinematographer) on Mermaid was Billy Morean, whose Aunt Beth (of Morean Art Center fame) allowed her St. Pete Beach house to be used for Doug’s domicile.
“I met Bill in California years ago, in film school. He grew up there on the beach, and we went to his aunt’s house for his 30th birthday, 10 years ago. I saw that house and I was like ‘Man, we should do a movie here one day.’ I’ve always wanted to make a beach movie on the beach I grew up with.
“It’s a very personal story for him as well. He has so many memories in that house, and on that beach. And it’s very much our sensibilities humor-wise, too. We both have a very dry, f–ked-up sense of humor. So we jelled on that.”
(768x583, AR: 1.3173241852487136)
Another of the movie’s central locations is the 33,500-gallon aquarium at RumFish Grill, at the TradeWinds Resort. The tank, 13 feet deep, and the RumFish dining room stand in for the strip club where Doug works, and where at least one violent action scene takes place.
According to Cornack, the tank scenes were originally written to be lensed at Weeki Wachee, home of Florida’s “original” mermaids. “We tried,” he says. “And they were not into it.”
So, “There were a lot of changes that had to happen on the fly with a script like that. It’s always alive is what I like to say. It doesn’t stop changing.”
And the look of Destiny – who is “played” by actress Avery Potemri – morphed at the very last minute. “I was working with a team for a number of months, working on the creature design I wanted to do,” Cornack explains. “I was about to fly to go start filming the movie when the company I had been working with dropped out. So we had to find somebody the day before I left, a brand-new team to start from scratch.
“And this four-month thing became 10 days. We had to shift the whole shooting schedule around to build this new mermaid, which none of us knew was going to look like until the day we started shooting.”
The production generated a local spend of $750,000, according to Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, with cast and crew accounting for 900 hotel room nights during the filming.
Mermaid premiered in March at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Pemberton was in attendance when the Beach Theatre advance-screened the film April 18.
Cornack’s film opens with the words “A love letter to Florida.”
“I just think there’s so much more comedy, even if it’s dry, strange weird comedy, if this awkward guy is talking to an animal,” he says. “A feral animal. I think it speaks more to Florida. To me, it speaks more to the roadside attraction Florida thing. I just think it creates more comedy than if she was an attractive siren, sitting in a tub.”
Doug, the filmmaker stressed, is as desperately lonely as he is messed up. He, too, is a fish out of water.
“I feel like this guy has been locked away in his house for a number of years, and he’s really had nobody to speak to, and nobody to come check on him. Nobody’s been doing a wellness check on him, and he’s been locked in this house with his dad’s things.
“And he can’t really communicate the outside world, so lo and behold, this is why she’s called Destiny. He creates this version of Destiny in his head, because he finds something incredible. And the only things he cares about, and can relate to, are fish.”
Screenings are Wednesday and Thursday at 7 p.m. Find tickets here.
This content provided in partnership with StPeteCatalyst.com