The former is the newest offering, the sophomore big-screen effort from writer and director Robert Eggers (who last brought us THE WITCH), starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. The latter is a 2017 French/Spanish film. (Read my review of COLD SKIN here.) Both movies involve two men experiencing the isolation of living on a rocky island manning a lighthouse, with the isolation slowly eating away at their sanity. And both involve mer-people. With THE LIGHTHOUSE, the fishy folks may or may not really exist outside the mind, or minds, of the protagonists. With COLD SKIN, they are very real, and very dangerous.
Both of the films involve sex with a mermaid. Newcomer Valeriina Karaman is the fishy beauty in THE LIGHTHOUSE. And she answers one question this writer has always had: specifically, how could a man have sex with a mermaid if she has the bottom half of a fish? Karaman’s mermaid vagina is on prominent display in the film. Aura Garrido portrays a more scientifically-plausible mermaid in COLD SKIN. We don’t get to see her vagina, though her lower half is considerably more human-like in appearance. Which one would I rather cuddle up with? Good question. Is Daryl Hannah’s mermaid from SPLASH off the table?