Titanic Ocean Is No Ordinary Film

“Mermaids live underwater, but none of us here have been to the ocean.”

By the time the opening credits of Titanic Ocean (2026) finish rolling, it’s already obvious that Greek director Konstantina Kotzamani is fully committed to the film’s strange, hypnotic vibe. A group of aspiring professional mermaids with brightly dyed hair drift through a swimming pool while the camera does a 360, set to a smooth, unShazamable trip-hop track that somehow isn’t listed in the credits. This opening scene tells you everything you need to know about the movie: it’s dreamy, immersive, oddly soothing, and almost impossibly beautiful.

The film follows Akame (Arisa Sasaki), the newest student at an elite boarding school dedicated entirely to mermaid performance. Every part of the academy is giving that Sade “No Ordinary Love” (1992)  fantasy — pastel lockers, aquarium-themed dorms, fin-shaped blankets. The school’s dead-serious headmistress, Miss Etsuko (Sei Matobu), makes the philosophy clear early on: “You’re not a mermaid on shifts.”

To become one, you have to live like one. That means fully committing to a mermaid identity: choosing a name like Fantasy, Eternal Sunset, or Imagica; maintaining a perfectly fluorescent hair colour; selecting a signature siren song; and drilling swimming and breathwork until it all becomes instinct.

Akame chooses the name Deep Sea, which eventually leads her to Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers” (2010). A bloghouse-era anthem that’s been heard so many times over the years — in ads, movies, cafés, your mom’s car, basically everywhere — that it almost feels impossible to hear it with fresh ears anymore. Somehow, Kotzamani pulls it off, and it’s not done in that annoying way in which horror movies use a creepy rendition of a big hit in the trailer. The film never uses the original version outright; instead, the song first appears as a karaoke performance before returning later as an eerie orchestral arrangement that feels completely at home in the movie’s underwater dream world.

About thirty minutes in, you may start wondering what the film is trying to do. Is it about abandoning human identity for mythic fantasy? The punishing discipline required to become a professional mermaid? Finding your voice through performance? All of the above. Titanic Ocean reminded me of Jade Song’s 2023 novel Chlorine, particularly in the way both works blur athletic discipline, bodily transformation and the fantasy of becoming something otherworldly. The film moves at a glacial pace (it’s reeeally damn slow) and remains remarkably quiet and moody throughout, which will frustrate some viewers. For me, none of that mattered — it’s simply too mesmerising to resist.

I dug how it eventually moves away from the mean-girl-boarding-school setup it initially teases. Early on, it feels like it’s serving a typical “every mermaid for herself” dynamic, with some bratty teasing directed at the new girl. But instead of turning into a standard competition story, the movie becomes much more interested in the complex bonds between the girls themselves, especially Deep Sea’s relationship with Yokohama Blue (Kotone Hanase) and her rivalry with Eternal Sunset (Haruna Matsui). The competition never disappears, but it avoids repeating the simplistic mechanics we’ve seen in other films.

The bigger coming-of-age themes don’t fully come into focus until about an hour in, when the film starts digging into burgeoning sexuality and desire, and the unsettling realisation that we can deeply affect other people without fully understanding how. I won’t spoil where it goes, but Kotzamani handles those ideas, while tying them into classic siren song mythology, in a way that’s both beautiful and unsettling. There’s another coming-of-age film in Un Certain Regard this year that feels like something snoozy and familiar you’d see in the Berlinale Generation section, and Titanic Ocean is just not that girl.

It’s always a pleasure to watch a film that feels so cohesive. Every creative choice — the cinematography, the production design, the colour grading — feels locked into the same vision. Kotzamani, cinematographer Raphaël Vandenbussche, and production designer Sebastian Vogler create a world drenched in turquoise, pink and purple without ever making it feel visually repetitive. The set design is extremely detailed, and colours are heightened beyond artificiality, but they never overwhelm the movie.

Watching Titanic Ocean on shrooms would probably feel transcendent. But even sober, it has this uncanny ability to make you feel like you’ve drifted somewhere far away from reality for two hours.