Cannes 2026: Titanic Ocean
2026 Cannes Film Festival
Screening as part of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Konstantina Kotzamani's Titanic Ocean follows a young girl named Akame (Arisa Sasaki) who leaves the offered traditional pathway of education and career behind to join a professional mermaid school. This is the school where young women come to learn the physical and performance skills needed to perform as mermaids in aquariums. While there is camaraderie shared between the girls at the school, there is also a sense of competition and rivalry as they push themselves to perform the best. While training, Akame struggles to find herself and questions if she belongs.
Titanic Ocean is a film that works best when it is viewed from the surface. The cinematography by Raphaël Vandenbussche and the overall visual design of the film are quite unique. In nearly every shot, the filmmakers find a way to fill the screen with vibrant colors that get blended together with a visual softness of the picture, letting the images on screen glow and mix together, almost creating the effect of watching a dream rather than sharp reality. This immediately immerses the audience in the mind of Akame, who is chasing her dream. Mermaid school offers these women a chance to step outside their comfort zones and the expected paths of society. While the training is physically strenuous and things are far from easy, it gives them the chance to portray magic. Each of the girls at the school has their own individual reasons for choosing this road, but they all find themselves fully submerged in it. This world is not one that reflects the coldness or the sharpness of reality, so it makes sense that the portrayal of it would match.
However, when one jumps deeper into the film, things grow murkier. The biggest struggle of Titanic Ocean is in its character arcs and development. The film chooses to drop the audience in the middle of the action, offering no introduction to its characters. Because of the rigid schedule of training, the film has little time to breathe as it cycles its characters through seemingly endless reps of breath work, swimming exercises, and posing practice. Because of this, the audience has little time to actually grow to know its main characters, much less invest in their stories. The displays of character in the slivers of rest found between training are often misused. Without giving the audience a deeper understanding of the characters, the audience is forced to accept their personalities at face value, not being able to give them the benefit of the doubt or invest on a deeper level. Akame often comes off as rude, such as in a scene where she jabs at one of the more experienced girls in the school for smoking, even threatening to rat her habit out to the coach. The film exists in an awkward space, taking place in Japan but coming from a Greek filmmaker. The film is forced to work within the norms and traditions of Japanese culture, but ultimately fails to feel as if it's capturing the authentic soul of the culture. For example, the film is forced to acknowledge how Akame's behavior clashes with the traditional hierarchy of Japanese educational settings, which is quite strict in the expected treatment of different ages and experience levels, but the filmmaker doesn't actually have the interest to dive deeper into the subject or hold it against Akame, letting it awkwardly fade away.
Slowly, more and more is revealed about these characters, but this comes over an hour into the film. At a certain point, it is too little too late, and much of the audience is sure to be checked out by this point. The film also has a bad habit of trying to find meaning in purposely vague statements. In voiceover, Akame will ponder questions that sound deep, such as asking how long the girls would be able to hold their breaths in the real ocean instead of the pool or a bowl of water. These questions are worded poetically and spoken with a whispery breath that creates the appearance of meaning, but the audience is not actually able to engage with these statements because, in practice, they are almost universally hollow. Eventually, this becomes grating to try to sit through. The film takes this cycle of mermaid practice, meaningless questions, and poor character interactions, and repeats it over and over again. More than any other choice, the decision to make the film a whopping 132-minutes feels like the most damming. While it's possible to vibe with a lighter, more atmospheric effort for 90-minutes, stretching a project like this out to over 2-hours, without any meaningful evolution or substance to explain this decision, feels baffling.
It is easy to want to love Titanic Ocean. The film has a dreamy world that you want to live in, and at first seems like it has something poignant bubbling under the surface. However, just as the mermaids in the aquariums have to come up for air and reveal they are actually humans pretending to be magic, the audience is forced to slowly realize that the film is not going to live up to expectations.
