Review: ‘Mermaid’ wades into transgender life with a light touch
2026 / Dir. Fia Perera
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: A very Americanized version of Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy, or being a barfly at the only gay bar in your small town as a Hallmark Christmas movie is being filmed outside in the middle of July.
A 2020 study found that “82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.” Built around ripped-from-the-headlines culture war issues—trans bathroom use, drag queens around kids, conversion therapy—Fia Perera’s new film, Mermaid, sensitively explores one child and one family’s story through 10-year-old Cassie (Devyn McDowell, Annette, The Good Nurse) as she contemplates a similar fate, only to be brought into the orbit of struggling drag queen, Pepper.
This is not an After School Special or Hallmark Channel movie, but Mermaid and Perera use many familiar TV movie-style melodrama tropes, albeit in a thoughtful and well-executed way. You can almost immediately clock where this story is going, but that doesn’t make seeing the relationship between Cassie and Pepper evolve or Cassie finding space to express her gender identity any less enjoyable. More importantly, using this type of narrative and cinematic language could reach more confused parents or show trans kids that there’s hope and that they’re not alone.
Cassie’s father (Nat Faxon, Our Flag Means Death, The Conners) is a recent widower and clearly out of his depth, both as a father of a child with gender dysphoria and as a single father in general. While not heinous by any means, he decides to ignore what’s right in front of his face and hopes Cassie’s love of mermaids, desire to keep her hair long, and wear nail polish is just a phase. His inattention to her needs and the relentless bullying she faces at school are clearly drivers in seeking an alternate parental figure and family in Pepper (Arturo Luíz Soria).
While I’m not sold on a drag queen just named Pepper or some of Pepper’s performance skills (then again I live in Chicago, where we have arguably one of the strongest drag scenes in the country), Soria, in his feature film debut, delivers an impeccably balanced and lived-in performance. He’s a man who’s embittered over the loss of his husband and coasting on what’s left of his small Cape Cod town drag career in the town’s only gay bar. He’s a reluctant, wounded mentor figure to Cassie, but he’s also all she’s got in terms of a sympathetic ear.
Already a seasoned child actor, Devyn McDowell avoids the stereotypes of woodenness or overacting in child actors, delivering a natural performance that, along with Soria, grounds the movie and keeps it from veering into melodrama. I was particularly struck by the subtle ways McDowell plays Cassie as she gender-codeswitches between trying to still play the roles of her father’s son and the uncertain classmate, while being her true self around Pepper and the town’s queer community. The two play off each other so well that their heartwarming, playfully combative relationship keeps you invested in the story, even when you know how it’s all going to turn out.
What also helps Mermaid land is that it never feels like it’s exploiting some culture-war issue or getting overly soapy. Perera’s script keeps things tight and avoids unnecessary side plots, characters, and anything that gets in the way. There are a handful of moments that do go over-the-top, like a weeping Jesus statue and some pretty cheesy music that sounds like what you’d hear at a megachurch youth group, but they don’t distract from the core performance. Cinematographer Gareth Taylor takes advantage of the gorgeous Cape Cod setting to make this film look quite stunning at times, too.
Using familiar narrative tropes to tell a purposeful story intended to help trans kids and parents, Mermaid succeeds thanks to a touching central relationship. In an era where trans kids and adults are far from guaranteed any sort of acceptance in society, a movie where a trans girl gets a beautiful, happy ending can feel revolutionary.