THERE ARE MERMAIDS IN LA follows Cassie. Bored of her relationship. Having mediocre orgasms. Trying desperately to reupholster a lamp because why not?

“It might be the first step towards sewing patchy jeans or something.”

But one day Cassie’s boat is rocked by a mysterious silent visitor — a woman with long, fire-engine red hair and almost no discernible personality or clothes. We’ll call her Mermaid. Because, as the legend goes, she made a bad trade somewhere down the line and swapped her voice out for legs, then wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The place being Cassie’s backyard. RIP the prince.

As Mermaid makes herself comfortable in Cassie’s home, the two women begin to form an unlikely bond. The game is simple: Cassie talks and Mermaid listens.
Until they both get sick of it.

Director’s Vision for ‘There Are Mermaids in LA

“I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous. Everyone hasn’t met me yet.” – Rodney Dangerfield

MERMAIDS is a film about self-loathing. About how we fight and berate ourselves, time and again. For learning nothing. Speaking truth to nothing. Having endless bad days; asking the same questions on repeat to a comically mute universe. In the film, Cassie copes with an all-too-familiar isolation via inconsequential projects until a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ esque woman appears in her backyard, in need of some heavy reupholstering. But silence can be all too illuminating. And although Cassie turns to violence when that silence becomes overbearing, I’d like to believe that this troubled character learns something by the end: how to be alone with herself. As many of us had to be for an entire year in quarantine. And so my hope is that this film will help others feel less alone.