Mermaid Beach review – Wales gets its mermaidcore moment in teen-empowerment tale

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When discontented Lily becomes a fantastical sea creature her low-budget transformation is strikingly unconvincing, rather in tune with the whole film Mermaidcore comes to the Welsh coastline in this somewhat stilted family movie about a teenager called Lily who turns into a mermaid. You could imagine it being developed into a series for kids’ TV but as a film it unfortunately falls at the first hurdle – failing to pull off a convincing mermaid transformation. Poor Lily’s shimmering tail is very obviously made from nylon that becomes very clingy when wet, making her legs very visible under the scales. Ellie Bindman plays Lily, who has moved from London to the Welsh seaside with her family for her stepdad’s work. Resentful about leaving her friends, she is huffy, communicating with her mum Claire (Marie Wilson) primarily in eyerolls. Lily’s only friend in town is Shane (Jack Taruschio Thomas), an awkward, slightly odd trainee local reporter who is following a lead about a mermaid sighti...
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The Narrow Road review – tough times for the downtrodden in pandemic Hong Kong

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After deciding it’s time to seek help with his cleaning business, despairing Chak meets the zanily upbeat Candy

Set in Hong Kong during the early days of the pandemic, Lam Sum’s tender drama pictures a city haunted by economic and political uncertainty. Storefronts are plastered with foreclosure and bankruptcy notices, while talk of moving abroad hovers amid everyday conversations. Plagued by faulty equipment, the one-man sanitary service operated by world-weary Chak (played by Cantopop star Louis Cheung) is on the verge of breaking down. When asked by his ailing mother if God is telling him to give up the business, Chak self-deprecatingly describes himself as a speck of dust, so tiny that even the deities would not take notice.

Reluctantly hired as an extra pair of helping hands on his cleaning rounds, single-mom Candy (Angela Yuen) enters Chak’s life like a whirlwind of chaos. With her impossibly sunny attitude and colourful fashion sense, Candy could have come off as a manic pixie archetype; Yuen instead manages to lend an emotional weight to the character’s capricious quirkiness. A particularly devastating sequence finds the pair scrubbing the human-shaped stain left by a nameless soul who has died alone in squalor, another speck of dust forgotten by the outside world.

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