‘Titanic Ocean’ Cannes Review: A Surreal Dive into Desire and Identity

Unclassifiable and strange—much like her celebrated earlier shorts—Titanic Ocean unfolds as both a love story and a work of enchantment, blending intimate drama with fantastical epic. Reality, fantasy, and mythology intertwine in unexpected ways, shaping a film about mermaids and their song that also becomes a portrait of a young woman struggling, often painfully, to find her place in the world—this one or any other.

Greek filmmaker Konstantina Kotzamani has something of a nomadic career—she spent significant time in Argentina, where she shot the medium-length Electric Swan, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019—and her debut feature lands her in Japan, where much of the story unfolds. Its protagonist, Akame (Arisa Sasaki), has chosen to pursue an unusual profession: becoming a mermaid. Yes, it’s real, and there are training centers devoted to mastering this demanding and surprisingly complex craft.

Adopting the alias “Deep Sea”—a phrase lifted from a Lykke Li song that plays a key role in the narrative—she enrolls in a Tokyo mermaid school, where she must navigate both a tightly knit group of aspiring performers and an atmosphere of fierce competition. The students learn to swim with large monofins—far from easy—hold their breath for extended periods—potentially dangerous—sing, and develop a distinct persona and aesthetic routine.

At least initially, the film immerses itself in this world: its sensations, tensions, rivalries, and budding romances. Deep Sea is drawn to Kotaro (Masahiro Higashide), one of her instructors—nicknamed “Shark”—but struggles to bridge the distance between them. Meanwhile, the increasingly demanding expectations placed on the students—longer breath holds, more “magical” vocal performances of the kind associated, through myth, with mermaids—begin to erode the confidence of its sensitive and insecure protagonist.

Everything shifts after an accident during a test. From that point on, both Akame’s experience and the film itself take a radical turn, drifting slowly into the terrain of fable. The everyday routines of the mermaid trainees—who are also preparing for an international competition—begin to merge with a kind of parallel universe that Akame enters in pursuit of Kotaro’s attention. In this liminal space, love, desire, and the fantastical collide in ways that are consistently surprising and often disorienting.

As with many films from the new wave of Greek filmmakers, there’s a fascination here with unlikely hybridizations: between realism and fantasy, the human and the animal—most famously explored in the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, particularly in The Lobster, but also a recurring trait in Kotzamani’s cinema—and between relatively linear storytelling and outright surrealism. Through the gradual deployment of visual and sonic effects, Kotzamani pulls the film away from its grounded beginnings, subtly distorting the environment as Akame’s body and perception begin to shift.

Akame—AKA Deep Sea—is, ultimately, a girl searching, quite literally, for her own voice within a world constructed largely for the pleasure of others. The blend of underappreciated sacrifice and relentless perfection demanded of the students may initially seem alluring—especially to younger viewers captivated by the mythology and colorful spectacle of mermaids—but it soon reveals itself as a kind of trap, a point reinforced through various subplots involving other trainees. With metamorphosis as its central metaphor, Titanic Ocean becomes a fable of female empowerment, a film about the power to make waves and the possibility, with one or two fins, of swimming until reaching a shore where you can finally find yourself.