Blame it on a thrift shop find and an incessant curiosity for cinema car wrecks. I stumbled upon a DVD of Sean McNamara’s 2022 film The King’s Daughter last week and felt compelled to give it a look.

Well, it was released in 2022 at any rate. This teen-oriented historical fantasy was actually filmed all the way back in 2014, but then languished in anonymity while a succession of film companies and distributors bought and sold the rights. For a while I assumed it was an urban legend: an entire feature film, shot in France and Australia with a cast including Pierce Brosnan and William Hurt, left somewhere on a shelf to fester? It beggared belief.

The film adapts Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula-winning 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun, about King Louis XIV of France’s quest to gain immortality by consuming the flesh of a mermaid. Brosnan plays the king in question, Hurt his priestly confidante, and Kaya Scodelario his illegitimate daughter Marie-Josèphe – who takes up the task of convincing Louis to spare the mermaid’s life. The mermaid is played, with a healthy dose of CGI, by Chinese star Fan Bingbing.

This is no fly-by-night operation, nor a tax-avoiding Euro-pudding. Originally backed by Paramount Pictures with a full 2015 theatrical release planned, it benefitted from extensive financial investment by a Chinese partner. During a tortured development period the film passed through Sony Pictures, Jim Henson Productions, Focus Features, Walt Disney, director Gregory Hoblit, and actor Natalie Portman. Even after filming was complete, The King’s Daughter changed hands fives times before finally collapsing across the finish line in 2022.

With all of the shifts in ownership and release delays, one would be forgiven for assuming The King’s Daughter would be an unwatchable mess. It turns out this is only partly the case. In the main this is a relatively straightforward teen fantasy with a plucky heroine, a dashing romantic co-lead, a glamorous historical setting, beautiful frocks, and a mermaid. It does not excel, but neither does it completely embarrass itself.

Kaya Scodelario is an appealing protagonist, delivering a performance that fits in neatly with her other popular franchise roles in The Maze Runner (2014) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). Pierce Brosnan is visibly game as a lothario king, but instinctively feels miscast. An unconvincing wig does him few favours, and he never quite sells the idea of being an 18th century king. Other notable actors like Hurt and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Rachel Griffiths suffer from weak characterisation or limited screen time.

Between when the film was shot and when it was released Fan Bingbing, a major Chinese star during production, saw her embroiled by controversy and effectively blacklisted from China’s film industry. This would explain why her role seems so truncated and the visual effects surrounding her mermaid character so lacking, and potentially why The King’s Daughter was delayed for some many years. There is, it must be noted, a slightly unfinished quality to the overall film. The first act in particular is an absolute mess, with half-completed scenes strung together awkwardly with a Julie Andrews narration struggling to pull it all together.

Making films is hard, and it is easy to forget just how hard when we viewers only ever see the successful ones. It seems almost miraculous that The King’s Daughter emerged at all. It is hardly decent enough to recommend, but at the same time it seems a fascinating artefact. Fans of the McIntyre novel may feel intrigued enough to take a look.