Dis­cov­er this new mer­maid movie with a very dark twist

If movies have taught us any­thing it’s that mer­maids are unques­tion­ably delight­ful crea­tures. They bat their long lash­es, pine for brave male sav­iour to spir­it them from their briny prison, and ascribe to any num­ber of neg­a­tive female stereo­types. A new Pol­ish film, enti­tled The Lure, arrives with the sole aim of assur­ing its audi­ence that mer­maids can be nasty if they want to be. They don’t just sit there and smile with giant oys­ter shells cov­er­ing their par­tic­u­lars. And they sure as hell don’t need men to do their bid­ding for them.

Agniesz­ka Smoczynska’s film, which screens at the 2016 Mel­bourne Film Fes­ti­val, is a grotesque and gory cor­rec­tive to fam­i­ly favourites such as The Lit­tle Mer­maid and Splash. It opens with a man qui­et­ly strum­ming a gui­tar on the edge of a lake, his unwit­ting siren song sum­mon­ing two female-fish hybrids to the shore. They are exot­ic, allur­ing crea­tures, and he feels pangs of sex­u­al desire when he first lays eyes upon them. Luck­i­ly, he plays bass in a near­by erot­ic cabaret house band, so he con­vinces his seedy boss to bring these strange sis­ters into the com­mer­cial fold. It’s not long before they are the star attrac­tion, reveal­ing their strange­ly elon­gat­ed fins while loung­ing back in a giant cham­pagne glass. And all this before any of the real crazi­ness starts.

While The Lure might come across as a grungy fem­i­nist hor­ror fan­ta­sy, with empow­ered women (and fish women) sock­ing it their male oppres­sors, it is first and fore­most a musi­cal. It’s like Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd has been chan­nelled through a Euro-cen­tric elec­tro­clash revival, as char­ac­ters play along to the action with synth drums and key­tars, wail­ing about their end­less pain and bore­dom via emo-inclined indie lyrics. It’s not wall-to-wall singing, but it’s cer­tain­ly no half-heart­ed attempt at a point­less genre mash-up. Smoczyn­s­ka and com­pa­ny have clear­ly put an amaz­ing amount of time and effort into this endeav­our, and while watch­ing it’s rare that you feel the easy road has been taken.

With all these styl­is­tic ele­ments tossed into the pot, The Lure is not a movie to sat­is­fy those who need a clear­ly defined three-act dra­ma with cred­i­ble plot twists and log­i­cal tran­si­tions from scene to scene. The film is more like an extend­ed mon­tage with a very, very slim sto­ry­line hid­ing just beneath the sur­face. The sis­ters’ mood swings, their con­stant shape-shift­ing and their insa­tiably lust for blood are what gives the film its for­ward momen­tum. They are tak­ing on the world, react­ing to it, enjoy­ing it, and some­times attempt­ing to break it to pieces.

The slick, neon inte­ri­ors of the club offer a visu­al coun­ter­point to the ram­shackle apart­ment in which the sis­ters live, and the film takes great glee in hav­ing its char­ac­ters move between a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent spaces. The music, too, runs the gamut between an open­ing Don­ner Sum­mer cov­er and a nu-met­al stom­per in which our hero­ines bounce around on a stage while wear­ing black face­paint. It’s a movie that hap­pi­ly prizes style over sub­stance, but, like its sub­jects, at least it’s always will­ing to adapt in order to sur­vive. It’s a defi­ant­ly unique work, and Smoczyn­s­ka always appears ready and primed to push the enve­lope as and when she needs to. Would this have been just as effec­tive as a 20-minute short? Prob­a­bly. Yet genre heads will like­ly pre­fer this in its longer, wack­i­er package.