Blue My Mind (2017)

The mermaid has always been male fantasy made flesh - and fin. This film twists the fantasy into something biting and precise.

Lisa Brühlmann's 2017 debut BLUE MY MIND stars Luna Wedler as Mia, a teenage girl whose body has started doing things she can't explain or stop. The film begins as social realism - new school, new friends, the cruelty of adolescent hierarchies - and slowly, without announcing itself, becomes something else.

The transformation at the center of it is handled with a refusal to romanticize that feels almost aggressive. This is not Ariel. There is nothing wistful here.

Brühlmann treats the mermaid myth as a map for something girls actually go through: the body becoming alien, desire arriving before you're ready for it, the sensation that you are turning into a creature no one around you can understand. Body horror as puberty. Puberty as body horror. The two turn out to be almost interchangeable.

The film was shot largely in and around Zurich, which gives it an unusually grounded, fluorescent-lit feel - the opposite of the oceanic dreamscapes you might expect. Reality stays intact right up until it doesn't.

Wedler is extraordinary. Brühlmann has not made enough films since (she's been mostly working in television), which is the cinema's loss.