Scales

5/28/2026

“You’re living every little girl’s dream,” the young heroine of Scales: Mermaids Are Real (2017), whose given name is literally Siren (Emmy Perry), is told. “You’re officially a mermaid, honey!” I would have thought that every little girl dreams of being, I dunno, a princess or something like that; turning into a grotesque cryptid sounds more like a nightmare. Do a lot of little girls watch The Fly and go, “Gee, I wish that happened to me but with a fish instead”? Underneath the sunny milieu, there’s some Innsmouth-type stuff going on in this film (never a good sign when there are repeated references to “The Others”), but only Siren herself comes close to grasping the lovecraftian implications, and even then not for long. The main characters reside in an unnamed beachside town r