The Lure Reviews

What a glorious mess this is! The Lure takes the familiar story of The Little Mermaid and presents it as a horror-musical set in 1980s Poland. If that sounds an exercise you’re willing to endure, and I really hope that you are, then you’ll find a lot to enjoy in The Lure, even when it doesn’t all work.

The wild ambition on display here is more than enough to overpower its structural and tonal flaws. There’s a pervading sense that actions are happening just because without enough context, and while that can occasionally be excused by the daring imagery it does eventually get confusing. A certain amount of grounding and information is necessary to contextualize just what is happening and why.

Absurdity and tragedy don’t just interact here but frequently blend together or end up throttling each other for dominance. There’s a doomed romance built upon the back of its fairy tale origins, but there’s also the frequent sight of the mermaid sisters eating men. A shocking and nuts image is of one of them crawling back to the water with a human heart in her mouth. I think it was around this moment that I transitioned from surrendering to the strange power of this film and into full-blown outsized enjoyment.

I immediately surrender during an opening scene that found the cabaret band doing a cover of “I Feel Love” while the sister giddily demonstrated their eel-like tails in a dressing room to the club’s manager. Next thing you know the two are performing in a gigantic champagne glass and flashing their tails for the confused (and aroused) patrons like they’re a pair of aquatic Dita von Teese. If that sounds like a moment of high-camp, then that’s quite simply because it is. The Lure slams camp and horror into the same frame over and over again, sometimes smoothly and more often jerkily.

It’s hard to believe that this is Agnieszka Smoczynska’s first film as it glides along with a confidence and the high-powered imagination of a long-time film-maker. She creates an entirely singular cinematic world for this story. Bits of David Lynch or David Cronenberg pop-up, but the absurdity and body horror those greats traffic in are clearly woven into a larger fabric that Smoczynska is creating. She feels unburdened by stronger metaphorical import and happy to just stare at the mindfuckery and strangeness of the film she is making. The Lure looks and feels like a fabulous bit of future cult cinema unspooling before your eyes, and you mark me down as a fan.