My Brother Is a Mermaid
2019 · 20m
Directed by Alfie Dale
Genres: coming-of-age, family, LGBTQ+
Tones: melancholic, mythic, tender
A young boy's unconditional love supports his older sibling Kai, who is bullied for their feminine self-presentation in a desolate coastal town.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The mermaid metaphor feels like it's doing the heavy lifting instead of the actual story—I wanted the film to commit harder to the weird, to let the magical premise genuinely unsettle rather than just soften the edges of a very conventional coming-of-age arc.
Dale situates this firmly in the British social-realist lineage while allowing mythic undertones to surface with restraint; the formal choice to let landscape and silence carry as much weight as dialogue shows real curatorial intelligence about tone.
The decision to shoot Kai's self-expression through the younger brother's gaze—never pitying, just witnessing—is what transforms what could've been a message-heavy narrative into something genuinely tender, and that perspective shift is sustained with remarkable discipline across twenty minutes on what's clearly a modest budget.