There are films that arrive like waves — silent at first, then overwhelming. Invasion of the Mermaids is one of them: a film of haunting elegance, where myth breathes salt and sorrow, and the ocean itself becomes both witness and executioner. It’s not a fantasy in the usual sense — it’s a reckoning.
The story begins on a gray, trembling shore. Maren, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a journalist haunted by her own silence — a reporter who once ignored a story that cost hundreds of coastal lives. When whispers of the sea “singing” reach her desk, she sets out to investigate. The trail leads to the ruins of a drowned village and a name carried by the wind like a hymn: Aurelia.
Angelina Jolie’s Aurelia is the ocean incarnate — serene, terrifying, and utterly magnetic. When she first rises from the depths, surrounded by a tide that glows with the ghosts of the drowned, it’s not spectacle but sacrament. She doesn’t come to destroy; she comes to remind. Her voice is not rage, but mourning — the kind of mourning that turns calm waters into storms.
Director Sofia Andren crafts the film with painterly restraint. Every frame glimmers with bioluminescent blues and cold silvers, light bending like memory. The sea feels alive — watching, remembering. Each reflection hides a face, each ripple carries a whisper. The camera moves like a current: slow, rhythmic, impossible to escape.
The relationship between Maren and Aurelia is the film’s beating heart. It’s not human versus myth — it’s confession versus consequence. Johansson gives one of her most intimate performances, her every gesture steeped in guilt and awe. Jolie, radiant yet distant, becomes the embodiment of divine retribution — a being too ancient for mercy, yet too broken for cruelty. When their eyes meet across the tide, it’s as if the world itself holds its breath.
Beneath its otherworldly beauty, Invasion of the Mermaids is an allegory of environmental sin — of oceans poisoned, promises broken, and the arrogance of those who think the sea forgets. “The sea remembers every sin,” Aurelia whispers, as oil burns atop the waves. It’s a line that cuts deeper than any blade, because in her voice, the planet itself speaks.
The sound design is intoxicating: the hum of coral, the pulse of waves, and the faint echo of voices just beneath the surface. Every sound feels alive, as though the audience is being slowly submerged. Composer Ramin Djawadi weaves a score that drifts between lullaby and lament, strings trembling like the sea before a storm.
By the third act, the investigation becomes an awakening. Maren realizes she isn’t chasing a story — she is the story. Her past complicity in the cover-up of the drowned village binds her fate to Aurelia’s vengeance. Humanity, she learns, doesn’t need monsters from the deep to destroy itself; it only needs to stop listening.
When the final storm comes, it’s less a battle and more a baptism. Aurelia’s army of spectral mermaids rise beneath a red moon, reclaiming what was stolen — not just lives, but memory. Maren stands on the shoreline, notebook in hand, and whispers the truth she once buried: “We deserved this.” Then the tide takes her, and the screen fades to black.
In its final moments, Invasion of the Mermaids leaves us staring into an endless horizon — beautiful, tragic, and impossibly alive. The ocean has claimed its debt, but not without offering grace. The last image — a single seashell resting on a newspaper’s front page — feels like a message: that truth, like the tide, always returns.
Breathtaking, sorrowful, and eerily prophetic, Invasion of the Mermaids is not just a film — it’s an elegy. A warning wrapped in poetry. A reminder that nature’s silence is never empty… it’s waiting. 🌊
Watch movie:
*Content is hosted on a partner site.
