Vassilis Kroustallis reviews the Konstantina Kotzamani feature film 'Titanic Ocean'.
Beguiling and bedazzling, Greek Konstantina Kotzamani's debut feature 'Titanic Ocean', a Greek/German/Romanian/French/Spanish/Japanese co-production, premiered at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) and has landed as an ocean story, in which the gravitational force between the main character's desire and its impact into the world is all that matters (and reasoning had better be absent).
The setting is a Japanese boarding school where teenage girls train to be mermaids for photo opportunities at large, tourist-trap aquariums. The stakes are high: the demands of swimming underwater, breathing exercises, posture, and the impossible tail worn are only some of the hurdles young mermaids will face. They are also aware (their teachers will soon remind them) that the competition is high, and only the best will be selected -to swim amongst well-meaning sharks.
Yet the film never veers into a dystopian mood but instantiates (in painstaking visual terms) a teenage fantasy world. Akame/ Deep Sea (Arisa Sasaki) is a future mermaid who still hasn't found her voice and the karaoke song that will define her. She dreams of a 'Titanic Ocean' (instead of the Pacific Ocean) and cannot sing or meaningfully communicate with her peers. Other teenage girls (Yokohama Blue, The Eternal Sunset) seem to have their own troubles to be in the closet and, one time or another, they move closer to the world of Akame. Yet, the 'Titanic Ocean' is single-handedly devoted to its main character: Akame's need to test her limits and see how "strong women make waves" (a mantra-like motto in the film) leads her from initial fear to almost self-sacrifice. But a mermaid is silently born and tests her first love affair. At the same time, a welcome coach Kotaro (Masahiro Higashide) seems to be the one ready to face the consequences of love -in a reversal of the classic Hans Christian Andersen 'Little Mermaid' story.
One of the most immersive atmospheres in recent years, 'Titanic Ocean' looks like a VR film, immaculate in all its visual (cinematography: Raphaël Vandenbussche, production design: Sebastian Vogler) and auditory (sound: Marius Leftărache, Liviu Lupșa, Victor Miu, Dragoș Știrbuscore, score: Patricia Ferragud) details. Especially, the overgrossing ambient sound atmosphere is another character, the voice in Akame's own insecurities, with an adapted 'I Follow Rivers'(Lykke Li) to become a defining film element. The visual world reveals more than pop aesthetics: it is a secret queer world in the making that the script, unexpectedly, chooses not to explore (apart from fleeting instances, such as Yokohama's Blue's affection for night sleep with Akame). So, female homosociality here is mostly a curiosity and secondary to the main curse and puzzle Akame has to face.
But it still leaves its mark on a society that admires social pretenses instead of meaningful progress; the sugar daddy who takes care of the Eternal Sunset (and his gorgeous villa), the worried parents (especially mothers here) who think their investment in their children's training doesn't pay off. And in an almost newsreel sequence, Kotzamani adopts a third-person view of the outside world, finally hooked on the mermaid phenomenon (or girls trapped for the audience's amusement).
The ending and the majestic sea sequence will have Asake out of her bowl, somewhere in between Yokohama Blue's exit and The Eternal Sunset's companion to the open ocean. Arisa Sasaki herself is a marvel of calculated fear, despair, and decisiveness, all in a single facial expression. Her audience performance of movement in stillness gives the film its core and energy.
Difficult to look away from the film, 'Titanic Ocean' uses its magnetic qualities to tell an ancient story of seduction and adult determination. A brilliantly constructed tale of adulthood, it still leaves some of its relationship stitches loosely connected. This is an emotive world, in which competitiveness, primal fear, and the life instinct get free rein -and offer a vivid portrait of the teenager's end of the world and the adult's beginning of a new one.
'Titanic Ocean' premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard).
Vassilis Kroustallis
