A Tail (2026)
A Tail has a premise so bold and so promising that I spent most of its twelve minutes rooting for it to stick the landing, and I came away admiring a great deal while wishing it had been braver with its ending. Rosie Gaunt-Mathieson's modern mermaid comedy drama is sharp, well-made and anchored by a terrific lead turn, but the place it finally chooses to leave its heroine deflated me a little. A solid three stars.
The hook is a gem. Gemma, played with wonderful, self-deprecating candour by Hayley Morris, wakes on the morning of a crucial job interview to find she has grown an enormous mermaid's tail overnight. She is, by every measure that should matter, the right person for the job, and yet she finds herself quietly excluded the moment she arrives, judged on her strange new body rather than her ability, and refused even the dignity of working from home. As a sharp, absurd metaphor for how women's bodies are policed, objectified and held against them, it is a genuinely clever and timely idea.
Morris is the film's great asset. Known online for turning the awkward, taboo realities of the body into laugh-out-loud comedy, she brings exactly that fearless honesty to Gemma, mining both the slapstick indignity of dragging this unwieldy thing through a provincial seaside town and the quiet shame underneath it. Letty Butler is lovely too as the sister who steps in to help her through the day, and the whole thing is handsomely put together, the chilly Brighton backdrop, the prosthetic and effects work on the tail, Karina Byrne's score, all pulling their weight.
My problem is purely with where it goes. I had assumed, and hoped, the film was building towards Gemma embracing the very thing that set her apart, turning the tail into a source of power and refusing to shrink herself for a world that could not accommodate her. Instead, the narrative takes a stranger, bleaker turn: she cuts the tail off, cooks it on a barbecue, and returns, masked and diminished, to look like everyone else. I can see the dark, satirical point being made about the lengths women are pushed to in order to conform, but after such a spirited, defiant setup it felt like a capitulation rather than a comment, and the film ended on a flatter, more deflating note than its brilliant premise deserved.
Three stars. A Tail is an inventive, funny and visually confident short with a knockout central performance and a premise bursting with potential, let down only by an ending that trades its empowering promise for something more muted. It is well worth a look for Morris alone, and for a concept this fresh, and I will be first in line for whatever Gaunt-Mathieson makes next, I just wanted it to let Gemma win.
Related on Movies With Macca
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