Have you ever watched one of those movies that forces you to sit in silence, shudder loudly, and then resume going about your existence as if you weren’t deeply disturbed by the story you just witnessed unfold? This is how I felt after watching 2025’s Mermaid, which begins with Tom Arnold getting killed off-screen by a hideous finned creature that somehow made its way onto his character’s boat, just before saying that this movie is a “love letter to Florida.”
All of my in-laws live in Florida, and I’m always getting sent those crazy “Florida Man” headlines as a way to keep the conversation going. With that context in mind, this is the most Florida thing I’ve ever seen. On the surface, it’s a story about an unemployed fish tank cleaner who finds a wounded mermaid (after she kills Tom Arnold, who’s never seen or heard from again in this film), intending to nurse her back to health before letting her back out into the wild.
Beneath that murky, chummy water, though, is a much deeper story about addiction, purpose, and trying to find connection in a world that’s more isolated than ever. Mermaid is also morbidly hilarious and features some of the most repulsive creature designs I’ve ever seen, which makes the whole thing feel like a waking nightmare.
If you’re from Florida, you may want to give Mermaid a go for its sheer ridiculousness alone. But you really don’t need much context beyond the above description to know you’re about to take a deep dive into a world that doesn’t seem real at first, but hits uncomfortably close to home if you’ve ever watched somebody close to you lose themselves to addiction.
Not You’re Average Ariel
Mermaid centers on our supremely likeable but completely tapped-out Doug (Johnny Pemberton), who makes an honest but meager living cleaning fish tanks. When we first meet him, he’s getting fired from his strip club job because, according to his boss, nobody shows up for the massive fish tank. We learn how lonely and isolated Doug’s life is during his usual custody visit with his daughter, Layla (Devyn McDowell). He tries to connect with her on the most fundamental level, but she’d rather go home and spend time with her mother, Tina (Julia Valentine Larson), and stepfather, Keith (Kevin Nealon).
Outside of his dysfunctional former family life, Doug is hopelessly addicted to various substances. If he’s not drinking, he’s popping pills, and if he’s not popping pills, it probably means he’s out of money, which incenses his late father’s friend and local drug dealer, Ron Bocca (Robert Patrick), and his son, Gator (Tyler Rice), who doubles as his enforcer. Doug owes Ron a ton of money, which the latter is willing to let slide given how long they’ve known each other, but their relationship has hit a boiling point. Before long, the father and son are threatening him and roughing him up.
Which brings us to our titular creature, the mermaid portrayed by Avery Potemri. While wandering the marina and contemplating suicide one day, Doug discovers the boat from the beginning of the film and decides to take the creature in and nurse it back to health. This mermaid is the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and it’s truly the stuff of nightmares. It’s also implied that the mermaid is an apex predator, and if she were actually healthy, she’d have no problem ripping somebody’s throat out without hesitation if she felt threatened or got hungry.
Doug, in his infinite wisdom, decides to let her live in his apartment, but it’s not even out of some weird, twisted romantic interest or anything like that. He genuinely cares about fish, and this woman is nothing but. He lets her live in his bathtub and feeds her copious amounts of drugs (often crushed up in Spaghettios) so she can properly heal and, hopefully, not kill him in the process. As you would expect, the already fractured family dynamic Doug experiences takes a turn for the worse, and matters only continue to escalate when Ron realizes he could probably exploit the mermaid for financial gain, which would square him up with Doug.
Wasn’t Expecting To Get This Emotional
At its core, Mermaid is a dark comedy about watching somebody lose themselves to addiction. Doug is such a good guy, but he’s also a freakin’ weirdo. He copes with his awkwardness by consuming whatever drugs he can get his hands on, and I don’t think there’s a single second in this movie when he’s not in an altered state or coming down from one. When he decides to bring the mermaid out for his daughter’s birthday, it causes a scene, to say the least, which prompts Tina, Keith, and Layla to show up at his place to deliver an intervention.
There were several times during the film when I truly wondered if the mermaid was real or a figment of Doug’s imagination, but since this isn’t a psychological thriller, and that would be a cop-out, it’s made clear that we’re dealing with an actual mermaid. Most people in this world simply refuse to believe it’s real, even when it’s brought out in public.
While you should definitely be concerned about whether the mermaid is going to eat somebody’s face off, the thing that’s truly alarming about Doug’s relationship with the creature is how much he needs her around. It’s not a romantic interest, however, but rather a platonic one, as far as I can tell. The man is simply so lonely that this is the only living being he can form a meaningful connection with, even if he spends most of his time drugging her and stitching up whatever injuries she sustained before they met. In my mind, he feels like he lost his daughter, and this is his only way to be a nurturing father figure and feel appreciated for it.
The intervention scene, when Layla reads him a poem about how she’s afraid to lose her father, is truly gut-wrenching and makes this whole bizarre movie pull at your heartstrings. But don’t worry, because from that point forward, Mermaid goes full-on Florida and delivers one of the most bizarre endings I’ve seen in a long time. At the very least, I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.
I track TV prices year-round, so I know that these 15+ TV deals ahead of Prime Day are actually worth it
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Best TV deals ahead of Prime Day
Prime Day season is one of the best times of year to buy a TV on sale. That’s been etched into our mental calendars in July for the past decade, but this year, hype for one of the year’s biggest shopping events starts in June: Prime Day 2026 will run from June 23 to 26. As always, worthwhile TV deals are already popping up in the weeks preceding the event.
The good pre-Prime Day TV deals aren’t just at Amazon. Half the time, the reason that TV deals during Prime Day go so hard is that competing retailers like Best Buy refuse to let Amazon get all the attention — and it has already started this year. If you don’t want to wait until the end of the month to grab your new TV, here are 15+ of the best TV deals I’ve found at Amazon and Best Buy ahead of Prime Day. Most models in this list match or beat their all-time record-low price, according to Amazon price tracker camelcamelcamel.
Hisense finally launched its highly-awaited RGB TVs on June 2. While both the UR8 and UR9 RGB TVs are on sale at Best Buy, there’s another 2026 Hisense TV with a much wilder discount: The 75-inch Hisense U7 Mini LED TV is just $1,197.99 after a massive 40% price drop from its usual $1,999.99.
Mashable Deals
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Just released in March, the Hisense U7 series has a pretty incredible lighting system for its price range. Its backlight benefits from full-array local dimming, which uses clusters of tiny LED bulbs that can fully turn themselves on or off for more precise contrast during any scene or livestream. Other impressive numbers include a peak brightness of 3,000 nits (great news for FIFA fans trying to watch a game during the daytime) and a native 165Hz refresh rate (great news for gamers on a budget).
This past weekend, Freddie and I sat in the park and played cards. The game was fun, but you know what was even more compelling? People watching. Couples, families, and a gazillion Knicks fans walked by us, and I realized that there’s a definite print of the summer…
Gingham! Do you wear it? It looks so cool and summery. Here are 15 pretty pieces — including the gorgeous shirt above — in partnership with Nordstrom…
Thoughts? If money were no object, this sundress is beautiful — and don’t forget about classic picnic baskets. 🙂
(Gingham shirt at top by Döen. This post is sponsored by Nordstrom, a retailer we’ve loved and worn for decades.)
By now, most audiences are aware of Liam Neeson’s status as an action thriller star, best known for taking on hordes of enemies at once in non-stop thrill rides such as Taken, The Grey, and The A-Team. In 2014’s mystery thriller A Walk Among The Tombstones, Liam Neeson stars as a private investigator hired by a drug kingpin to solve a mysterious crime. The film is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
A Walk Among The Tombstones combines two of Liam Neeson’s best qualities as a performer, allowing him to show off his impeccable fighting skills as a physical powerhouse while making great use of the actor’s unflinching humanity.
One Of Neeson’s Best Action Flicks
A Walk Among the Tombstones follows Liam Neeson’s Matt Scudder as he pays his bills performing private detective work in New York. As a disgraced former detective, Scudder is willing to work outside of the law with a number of unsavory characters, including a local drug dealer named Kenny Kristo. Kristo explains to Scudder that his wife has been kidnapped and subsequently murdered despite having paid the ransom that the kidnappers demanded.
In A Walk Among The Tombstones, Liam Neeson’s Matt Scudder is joined by a street-wise homeless youth named TJ (Brian Bradley), who assists him in making connections among the criminal underworld. Scudder and TJ begin to follow ledes that uncover corruption within the DEA, as well as a conspiracy by international drug trafficking rings that threaten to start an all-out gang war on the streets of New York.
As tensions continue to rise, Scudder brings TJ under his wing after learning that the boy has sickle cell anemia and is in declining health.
From there, Scudder and his team set up a sting in order to catch the kidnappers in the middle of a handoff with their next victim. When a shootout ensues, A Walk Among The Tombstones becomes an all-out gunfight, featuring one of Liam Neeson’s most gripping action sequences to date. The conclusion features a revolving door of gunshots that ring out, killing hordes of thugs, leading to the police finally taking down the drug traffickers.
Matthew Scudder’s Novelized Legacy
The film was written and directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Scott Frank, best known for screenwriting the hit 2017 film Logan, starring Hugh Jackman. Frank later went on to create, write, and direct the Netflix mini-series The Queens Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
A Walk Among The Tombstones stars Liam Neeson alongside a number of big-name actors such as Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens, The Predator‘s Boyd Holbrook, and Stranger Things‘ David Harbour. The film is based on a 1992 novel of the same name written by American crime writer Lawrence Block and serves as the second time the character of Matt Scudder has been brought to the big screen, according to IMDb.
Before the character appeared in A Walk Among The Tombstones, Matt Scudder was portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the 1986 film 8 Million Ways To Die. Block has penned 20 novels in the long-running series, the most recent of which was released in 2023. The events of A Walk Among The Tombstones adapt the tenth book in the long-running series as a standalone adventure.
Though A Walk Among The Tombstones did very well at the box office, the film received mixed reviews from critics.
The Liam Neeson-led movie made over $62 million at the worldwide box office against an estimated production budget of only $28 million, opening at number two at the box office behind The Maze Runner. The film holds a solid 68 percent score on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, though the audience score clocks in at only 53 percent.
To this day, A Walk Among The Tombstones remains one of Liam Neeson’s most underrated movies, which fans of the Northern Irish actor would surely be elated to check out. Though modern film fans have largely forgotten the over decade-old movie, it holds some of the best action sequences in Liam Neeson’s long and storied career while still giving the actor room to perform as a deep and nuanced character.
