Fishtales(2007)

One night, Serena (Amber Savva) officially introduces Neried (Kelly Brook) to her father, Thomas (Billy Zane), as “Frankie,” and she tells her father that “Frankie” is going to help him with his research to decipher the ancient Greek texts that talk about love spells. The following night, Thomas and Neried sit down together in the living room and take a good close look at the texts, and they soon manage to translate them in full. However, when they do, they instantly fall in love with each other, like the old stories had warned about the spells. Serena quickly notices this, and since this goes against her wish to have Neried and her father fall in love with each other naturally, she separates them and forces Neried to leave the house. Much later, the lovestruck Neried sneaks back into the house while Thomas and Serena are sleeping, and when she tries to tell the sleeping Thomas that she loves him, the sun begins to rise and her legs start to transform back into a tail. Left with no choice but to return to her nearby cove, Neried promises Thomas that she will come back before hurrying out the door.

After seeing both Thomas and Neried separately and seeing how each one is still head-over-heels in love with the other, Serena tells Thomas that Frankie’s real name is not Frankie and that she is really a mermaid, and he is only in love with her because he is under the influence of one of the love spells. Thomas is surprised by this news, but undeterred, and he tells Serena that he feels that he has made a mutual connection with Neried and he really wants to see her. He begs her to tell him where she is, so Serena caves in and tells him that she is at the cove. He goes down there and calls out to her, then attempts to swim out to find her despite having little knowledge on how to swim, but she doesn’t answer him or appear. However, unbeknownst to him, she has been watching him from afar and smiling and laughing. Serena is then shown writing a letter to Professor Coulter (John Nettleton), and after she thanks him for letting her and her father stay at his house in Spetses and tells him that their time there has been magical, she informs him that she knows for certain that his missing daughter is alright (because she figured out that his daughter is Neried [years ago, Coulter had met and fallen in love with Neried’s mother, who was also a mermaid, and they conceived her together]). She then writes that her father will finish his book, but he will need a little more time to do so, so she is asking him to go to the other heads of the Classical Studies department at Oxford University and persuade them to give her father that extra bit of time. After receiving the letter, Coulter goes and arranges a meeting with the other department heads, and they grant Thomas an extension by a two-thirds vote.

While Serena is out riding her bicycle on the same day she penned the letter, Captain Mavros (Alki David) – who knows that she is friends with Neried and seeks to claim the priceless jewels embedded in her tail – drives up alongside her in his automobile and demands to know where Neried is. Serena refuses to tell him anything, and he soon ends up crashing his vehicle, but he yells to Serena before she rides away that he will find the mermaid, kill her, and take her jewels. Meanwhile, Thomas figures out the meaning behind the phrase “what we catch, we throw away, and what we don’t catch, we keep”, which was on the cover of the book about mermaids that Serena found in her room, and when Serena returns home shortly afterwards, he explains to her that that phrase is the clue; it is the identical structure of every spell he is studying, and the spells are a catalyst to love. He elaborates further by saying that, once you are in love, the real love starts, and love is work and is completely rational, not a sickness as the ancient Greeks believed. Lastly, Thomas realizes that he is in love with a mermaid, but he is more than willing to make it work because it is true love. As he gets started on completing his research, Serena – knowing that she must inform Neried about what he just said – tells him that she has to go, and she quickly heads for Neried’s cove and swims out to her cave to see her. However, she is unaware that Mavros has followed her there and saw where she swam to, and now knowing where Neried resides, he hurries home to get his boat.

Serena asks Neried if the love spell has worn off, and Neried replies that it has now been replaced by various loving thoughts about Thomas. However, she questions how the two of them can ever be together, given the fact that they are of different species. Serena convinces her that she and her father need each other, so Neried brings her over to the well in her cave, known as the Well of Life. After filling a cup with water from the well, she explains to Serena that drinking this water has the potential to turn her into a mortal. However, it will only happen if her motives for becoming one are pure, because if they are not, she will die. Thinking about her love for Thomas, Neried drinks the water, and her tail turns into legs and she passes out. Shortly afterwards, she awakens a mortal woman, and she and Serena give each other a joyful hug. By this time, Mavros has arrived outside the cave in his boat along with his son, Dimitri (Felix Yanez), but Dimitri is not eager to see his father kill Neried and possibly harm Serena because, having spent time with Serena and having secretly watched her interact with Neried, he considers them both to be good people. After finishing his work, Thomas calls out to Serena, but notices that she hasn’t come back yet, and with a rainstorm starting to brew outside, he worries for her safety and sets out to find her. After going down to the cove and finding her belongings there, along with spotting Mavros’ boat in the distance, he decides that he must continue his search in the water and starts swimming.

Mavros fires a harpoon at the top of the cave that has a lit bundle of dynamite attached to the head of it, and the subsequent explosion triggers a cave-in. Neried and Serena scramble to grab as many of Neried’s treasures as they can before making their escape, but when they get to the surface, they find Mavros waiting for them. Unaware that Neried is no longer a mermaid, Mavros ensnares both her and Serena in a net before preparing another harpoon to shoot Neried with. However, Dimitri sabotages his father by hooking the harpoon’s line to his clothes and then kicking him in his left knee when he fires the weapon, which causes Mavros to miss and his clothes to get ripped off. Mavros locks Dimitri in the cabin for his actions and makes ready another harpoon, but before he can shoot it, Thomas climbs aboard, sneaks up behind him, and knocks him out by hitting him in the head with a small barrel. He then gets the ladies safely aboard and hugs them both before sharing a kiss with Neried. Mavros regains consciousness moments later, but before he can try anything else, Dimitri kicks the cabin doors open, which hit him and send him overboard.

Thomas returns to Oxford University and does a presentation showcasing his catalogue of conclusive proof of the love spells and how they depict the ancient Greeks as a whimsical, passionate, and romantic bunch of people who thrived on the values of humanity and love, and he gets a standing ovation from the assembly. Then, just before he leaves the campus with Neried and Serena, he jumps off the Magdalen Bridge into the water below like how the students do during May Morning to celebrate the coming of the summer. The movie closes with Thomas and Neried watching the sunset back in the cove in Spetses, and as they do so, Serena narrates that she, her father, and Neried go back to the island every summer. She also says that Thomas wasn’t quite sure how to footnote Neried in his book that he wrote about his research, given that she was his muse of inspiration, but there aren’t many classicists out there who have done what he has done: A very cool discovery.