The Mermaid (2021)

Although it starts out looking like a historical fantasy story, this movie actually takes place in the modern day, with a research vessel searching sea waters for merfolk. The ship successfully stumbles upon a group of merfolk and captures one of them, a memaid named Mengmei (Clara Lee). But in turn the ship's lead researcher Yang Fan falls into the ocean and is "rescued" by another mermaid, Xiao Yu (Lin Yan Rou).

Xiao Yu's actions are deliberate: she took Yang Fan in the hopes of using him as the means to rescue Mengmei. When Yang Fan wakes up, it's to the sight of Xiao Yu and her merfolk kin pretending to be indigenous human islanders who rescued Yang Fan from the ocean, and Xiao Yu follows Yang Fan back to the mainland where she insinuates herself into his life. Xiao Yu doesn't mean to fall in love, especially because time is of the essence as Yang Fan's boss and colleague are conducting cruel experiments on Mengmei.

It's a pretty straightforward story with echoes of other modern mermaid stories of its era like the Stephen Chow version, but delivered kinda clumsily but with way less comedic pratfalls. There's some underwater scenes but they're brief and with the expected CGI tails. There's also a melancholy ending when Yang Fan sacrifices his life to help Xiao Yu, and in return Xiao Yu sacrifices some of her magic so that Yang Fan can live but at the cost of losing all his memories of her.

The full movie is on youtube HERE.