The Lure

Coalescing the elements of horror, comedy, romance, musical, fantasy & coming-of-age drama into one abstract & ambitious fairytale, The Lure is an art-house endeavour that brims with fresh ingredients but it isn't a film for all. While some may be enamoured by its uniqueness, others will despise it for its muddy premise.

Set in Warsaw during the 1980s, The Lure follows a pair of mermaid sisters who are adopted by a family of musicians and are soon enlisted for gigs at the nightclub they regularly perform at. While one of them seeks companionship with the humans, the other is unable to escape her bloodthirsty nature and kills people with zero remorse.

Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska, The Lure is no doubt arresting from the visual standpoint and adds few new things to the mermaid lore but it also becomes repetitive after a while and is unable to immerse the viewers into its tale or make them invest in the characters inhabiting it. Also, there is no explanation for the significance of its 1980s setting.

The atmosphere is mysterious & sexually charged, songs are intriguing & tuneful, romance subplot feels forced, while the horror part is only present in bits n pieces. The chemistry between the two girls playing the mermaids is electric and fascinating to watch but the rest of the cast barely has any meat on them, and their presence makes no difference whatsoever.

On an overall scale, The Lure is a finely envisioned & well conceptualised idea but it's also poorly executed. Its plot is intriguing but never engaging, its images are aesthetically pleasing but never alluring, and although the effort is commendable, it's never emotionally involving. Promising & flavourful at first, it doesn't take long for The Lure to turn into a pungent smelling sea foam.

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 ...

Not going to lie, I had no idea about this film till I saw the upcoming artwork for the release of this film on Criterion Collection. I was instantly intrigued. Mermaids? Hell yeah! I don't think I've seen anything from Polish cinema; I only really watch foreign films when there is a good amount of buzz for a film and I feel I need to see it. I have to say this film is weird and bizarre but overall I felt it was quite creative despite not always hitting the right notes (not a pun on this being a musical, I swear).

The film is about two beautiful mermaids who befriend a rock band and then use their condition to become part of the group and entertain fans. Along the way one of the mermaids falls in love with a group member and longs to become a human to win his affection. The other has blood lust and is out to slash the throats and eat the hearts of men. Visually the performance scenes and the presentation of other dark scenes are done wonderfully.

I thought the film had a nice mix of being a horror film, a fantastical film, and a rock opera. The music was often catchy although I wasn't sure about the lyrics at all times (since they were very literal). The film is fairly erotic and captivating mainly due to the beauties of the two leads. The film does well to bring in mermaid lore and showing them as violent even if they may look beautiful. It basically felt like a horror take of The Little Mermaid at times.

My only concern is the film felt kind of imbalanced since it seemed fluid and didn't have a strong sense of accomplishing anything. Scenes just occur one into the next and seem like a progression without any real motivation. It's still a highly imaginative venture one that left an imprint, as I am sure was the intention. I'm not sure if I will pick it up on Criterion blu-ray but I am pretty pleased with the sort of outlandish nature of what was presented.

7.5/10

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.

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!