The Lure

It's 80's Poland. Two mermaids, Silver and Golden, are lured on shore. They join a strip act in a nightclub. Silver falls for Mietek and risks her life to be with him.

This is a Polish film reimagining the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Little Mermaid. It's a dark erotic horror musical fable. It's doing a little too much and gets a little disjointed. I would drop the carnivorous nature, and the musical. Others may see it differently. I couldn't figure out whether to fear for the mermaids and be afraid of the mermaids. The shifting can be jarring. I get the musical aspect's connection to the story but it doesn't really fit. The world building is also a bit muddled. It's somewhat confused whether people know about mermaids or not and the era does not get infused into the story. This is definitely ambitious even if it's too ambitious.

This is a solidly great film. It delivers on everything it promises - beautiful, original creature effects, a real sense of menace, boobs, and a fantastic musical score - and blithely throws in a few extras, like well-developed, interesting characters, a wonderful surreality, beautiful visuals, and a legitimately new twist on a story as old as the hills.

If there's any small criticism I have of this film, it's that a couple times there are characters that appear suddenly, do something, and then vanish, only to reappear later. There is no explanation of these characters, sometimes not even a name. I don't mind the lack to linear reality, but I did find myself asking questions about how these individuals fit into the greater story, and whether explanatory scenes had been cut. The only other not-positive thing I could say is that the dolphin noises are maybe a little silly.

That's honestly it. I really really enjoyed this movie, and I'm so glad the Calgary Underground Film Festival showed it. It needs more publicity!

In fact, I'm currently very frustrated because I can't find this movie or its soundtrack available anywhere. There's a song in the middle of the film that I'd love to listen to again, the 'Bloody Gloomy' song, and neither the clip nor the audio seem to exist online. Actually, I would love to watch the whole movie again; it's a very rich film, visually, with a lot of attention paid to little details like props and blocking and costumes. Especially as I was reading subtitles, I feel like I could gain a lot from a second viewing. I can only hope a North American distributor picks it up, as I would like to legitimately buy it and support Ms. Smoczynska. Good cinema deserves to be supported!

Which brings me to my last point.

This is actually my first review on IMDb, and I have to admit I'm leaving it partly out of frustration with the only other review for this film. If you don't like musicals, don't go see musicals! And if you see that a movie is classified as a musical, and you don't like musicals, and you go and see the musical anyway, PLEASE don't leave a negative review on the internet just because the MUSICAL that you CHOSE to see had MUSIC in it. That's like giving a horror movie a low score because it was scary! Come on now. You're discouraging people from going to see a perfectly good film because you don't like its genre, rather than any inherent flaw in the film itself. That's hardly fair. I hope people looking this movie up will give it a chance - it deserves much, much higher than a 3. I promise!

Criterion is the label - for special titles. Some say for classics (instant or not), others refer to the label for special movies in general. Movies that may not fit into a category. So this fits that category. It may not be a classic for various reasons, but at the end you may see and hopefully feel something that comes close to that feeling.

Up to that point there is some pacing issues, some timeline jumping issues and some issues with people and the way they behave, when faced with ... well our female main characters. If you can call their characters female that is. There is nudity, there is violence and there is singing too. A lot actually, so if you have issues with one or more of those things, this may not be for you in the first place. Otherwise a modern day fairy tale is what you get ...

Foreign films can be so refreshing. So let's see. It's about mermaids. Fantasy. That eat people. Horror. Who fall in love. Love story. And there's lots of singing and dancing. Musical. The songs are decent, but the lyrics sound like they were written by a crack addict. Could it really have lost that much in the translation? Oh, its Polish, so its subtitled. The acting and directing are generally well done. However, it feels like they took it out of the oven and released it before the film was done. So sometimes, it is touching and beautiful, with a classy European style, and other times, it is stupid beyond words. It is a take-off on the myth about the mermaid who tries to be a human girl when she falls in love. And that is all about sacrifice on the one hand, and being true to our nature on the other. A very unusual movie, especially for a director's debut film.

It was hard picking a rating for the movie because the highs are so high and the lows are so low. One thing is for sure though, The Lure is definitely worth seeing, preferably on the big screen.

The film starts on the banks of a dirty river where a family are singing and drinking. They encounter two young girls in the water, sirens who sing about wanting to be lifted out of the water. The family, who turn out to form a band in a sleazy cabaret, see an opportunity to use the girls for their own purposes and they soon have them performing as a sort of singing/strip tease act the highlight of which is when at the end of their song they dive into the water and their land legs transform bag into their fish tails.

Let's get one thing straight: the script for The Lure isn't big on making sense. Characters drop in and out to explain exposition in a ham-handed fashion, the musical numbers are scattered infrequently throughout the movie and the English lyrics are difficult to parse and seem to have little relation to what's going on on screen.

Yet somehow the movie still contains a lot of charm. First time director Agnieszka Smoczynska seems to be having a ball co-ordinating the cheap glitzy glamour of the musical numbers. Actresses Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska are great in their roles as sister sirens Silver and Gold imbuing them with innocence even when their sleazy guardians use them both sexually and financially.

The movie flits with deeper themes like emotional heartbreak, sisterhood, exploitation, sex, work etc. but the script never gives more than a handful of minutes to each issue so they're never fully explored. That's too bad but at the same time if you turn your brain off and just try to enjoy the movie you're in for a wild ride like nothing you've ever seen before.