- May 28
- 5 min read
Cannes Film Review of Titanic Ocean | Sparkling Mermaid Dreamland
% Mermaid Dream With Sparkling Ripples
Titanic Ocean marks the feature directorial debut of Greek female director Konstatina Kotzamani.
The film focuses on a boarding school in Japan dedicated to training professional mermaids, where teenage girls undergo rigorous training, dreaming of becoming "real mermaids".
A co-production between Greece, Germany, Romania, France, Spain and Japan, the film held its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2026, and received a nomination for the Caméra d'Or.
Despite limited public familiarity with the director's cross-border educational background, Kotzamani demonstrates a striking perceptiveness toward Japanese society. The overall sensory texture of the film evokes echoes of last year's coming-of-age movie Bunnylvr.
Both works depict young girls’ secret inner thoughts lingering behind glowing screens, prioritizing spiritual intuition over rational logic. Beneath these seemingly intimate coming-of-age narratives lies an undercurrent of global interconnectedness forged via internet links, present both within the films and in the real world outside them. Such films possess a peculiar contemporary allure, existing as hybrid entities that feel simultaneously alien and familiar.
The mermaid school attended by the protagonist Akame requires all students to abandon their given names and adopt mermaid stage names instead. Akame goes by the alias "Deep Sea" (portrayed by Arisa Sasaki). Her closest friend is "Yokohama Blue" (played by Kotone Hanase), while one of her biggest rivals is "Eternal Sunset" (portrayed by Haruna Matsui).
All students are mandated to dye their hair, and Akame chooses purple for hers. Each girl is remade and rebranded as a more fantastical "mermaid", navigating interactions with the outside world and making a living under this fabricated identity.
Among numerous Cannes films, this is a movie delivering an extremely uncanny viewing experience.
In terms of narrative framework, it is merely a clichéd Japanese coming-of-age tale: training while swimming and wearing prosthetic mermaid tails, picking representative colours and stage names, and rivalries between teenage girls centred on who can hold their breath underwater the longest. These elements inherently carry a satire targeting Japan’s idol industry and even the broader East Asian idol economy. Stripped of such idol-themed fantastical motifs, the film’s settings are indistinguishable from those of an ordinary Japanese girls’ high school.
The female protagonist, nicknamed "Deep Sea", is portrayed by rising Japanese actress Arisa Sasaki, born in 2000. She harbours an innocent adolescent crush on Kotaro, her male swimming instructor. Reserved and taciturn, Deep Sea possesses an extraordinarily delicate and sensitive inner world. Early in the film, she is rendered a voiceless mermaid; during music class, she can only produce faint hissing sounds or off-key notes. The cause of her muteness is left unstated, yet audiences can easily anticipate that she will find an outlet for her voice in her coach.
Deep Sea’s world revolves almost entirely around her male instructor. Legend has it that the songs of sirens and merfolk can entrance sailors completely. Her hesitant evasiveness, surging romantic longing in his presence, and the way she whispers his name repeatedly to soothe her longing all serve as prolonged foreshadowing of the mermaid luring in "the shark".
Towards the middle and latter half of the film, I Follow Rivers by Swedish singer Lykke Li functions as the core thematic anchor and emotional linchpin. The first time Deep Sea sings this song in front of Kotaro, the merfolk’s song merges seamlessly with her body, blending sound and form as one. A reworked version of the track is featured in the film, retaining its original lyrics. As she chants its purple-hued vocal waves over and over, the lyrics themselves serve as the perfect epitome and encapsulation of the character Deep Sea:
“Deep sea baby,
I follow you. Dark doom honey, I follow you.
You're my river running high, run deep, run wild...”
She practiced holding her breath underwater and singing diligently to stand out in the next monthly assessment. Zhang Hua of the Jin Dynasty recorded in *Records of the Strange*: "In the South China Sea live merfolk who dwell in water like fish and never cease weaving; pearls fall from their eyes when they weep." A mermaid’s tears carry a curse that causes anyone who offends them to bleed from all seven orifices. Yet in the film, "Deep Sea’s" singing voice also holds enduring love, and she fears that the true nature of her vocals will harm her teacher.
Critics take issue with the blatant depiction of imbalanced power dynamics between teacher and student, as well as between men and women, throughout the film, yet Kozamani chooses not to directly address the story’s dead-end dilemma. She draws viewers into an emotional maelstrom with a leisurely narrative pace, letting them sink fully into the emotional vortex conjured by the mermaid’s song and momentarily overlook the absurdity unfolding on screen.
"Deep Sea" clearly lacks the intense self-motivation forged by parental loss that defines "Eternal Sunset". Possessing an almost unadulterated kindness, she harbors not the slightest urge to belittle or sabotage others amid cutthroat competition. The drooping eyes and numerous close-up shots of Sasaki Arisa portray an ephemeral yet endlessly lingering feminine balladry, forming the core emotional anchor driving the entire film.
Another standout feature of the movie lies in its dense array of pop-culture merchandise spanning diverse categories. From anime-inspired wigs and cosplay outfits to the real urban lights stretching across Tokyo’s night sky, fragments of idol culture scattered among billboards collectively construct a tangible, authentic urban texture.
Titanic Ocean seems to deliberately occupy the boundary between documentary and fiction; reality serves both as set dressing and a crack leading into the virtual realm. The primary palette of overlapping blue-purple and pink neon hues, diffused and refracted through soft-focus lenses, bleeds into a pervasive sense of collective melancholy and loneliness. Surging synthesizer soundwaves propel dreamlike, surreal emotional sensations, while post-processed vocals carve an abyss amid the postmodern haze of online spaces and the illusions churned out by the idol industry.
The "mermaid pageant" featured in the film is real, operating on exactly the same logic as fan voting campaigns for idols: "mermaids" from all over the world gather to compete for the title via public voting. Kozamani directly embeds screen recordings of livestreams and short-video promotions into the footage, with real-time audience bullet comments retained as well.
Other screen recording materials include joint promotional content created by the duo "Deep Sea" and "Yokohama Blue", behind-the-scenes clips of the "mermaid" contestants, and more. The insertion of screen-recorded short videos and collaborative livestreams with idols endows the film with a calm, detached insight and subtle yet incisive satire beneath its dreamlike facade, precisely capturing various contemporary social spectacles.
The underbelly of youthful pop culture is also present throughout. In one KTV scene, "Deep Sea" accidentally walks into an elderly woman’s private room: the reflection on the glass window no longer mirrors prosperity and vitality, but serves as a mirror through which she gazes at her own aging self in the near future.
As Ishida Ayumi's Blue Light Yokohama plays on a loop, the audience’s thoughts are gently swept into the fading twilight of Japan’s golden age. Just as the "Yokohama blue" in the film eventually drifts back into ordinary people’s lives: teenage idols emerge one after another at a dizzying pace. Some quietly step back and vanish into anonymity amid this global tide of idol culture; deep beneath the ocean, others stir up waves of entirely new hues.
This is a motion picture crafted for theatrical release. Not everyone may grow to love it wholeheartedly, yet the siren’s song still holds most people spellbound long after they leave the screening room.
Image: From the Internet
Author: Yuanye Shuimu
Typesetting: Lu Xuanlong
Editor-in-Charge: Lu Xuanlong
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