Mermaid -- or more accurately, "Rusalka," the original title --  is a Russian import, a beautiful, whimsical and ultimately dark tale of a girl who is born with a magical sense of life and luck.

Alisa (or Alice, depending on subtitles) reveals that she was born from a mythic mating of a sailor and a Venus-on-the-half-shell version of her mother in the sea. Alisa grows up with a view of the magical realism around her as she and her mother and elderly grandmother move from the seaside to the the bi