This January, in support of the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women Against Rape, friends and family have raised over $1,500 (which, when matched by my employer, totals $3,000). As a result, I now have to watch and write about thirty-one horror movies: one each night. Any donors who contributed over $30 were given the option to choose one of the horror movies I must subject myself to. After each viewing, I will write some things about said movies on this website. Be forewarned that all such write-ups will contain spoilers, and many of them will refer to unpleasant and potentially triggering situations. Today’s film is the Polish mermaid murder musical (yes), The Lure (2016), directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure is her debut, but she’s working on a sci-fi opera based on David Bowie’s music). This film was not suggested by generous donor and co-worker, Samantha Devotta, but I watched it in tribute to her, as I figured it might be a horror movie she’d like, given she’s a big music fan. Let’s find out if I’m entirely wrong! I rented it from Queen Video.
What happens:
Trigger warnings: Domestic abuse.
After a neat illustrated opening credits sequence (that looks like it could have been done by Shary Boyle), we enter 1980s Warsaw, where two teenage mermaids come across a family band singing by a barrel fire. The mermaids begin to sing back to them, making the humans aware of their presence. The mother of the family sees the two mermaids and screams.
That family doesn’t just sing around barrel fires, though – no. We cut to their group, Figs ’n’ Dates, performing at a burlesque night club, where the mother, Krysia (Kinga Preis) sings Donna Summer’s disco anthem,”I Feel Love,” while her husband, Perkusista (Andrzej Konopka) lays down the rhythm with his drums, and young adult son Mietek (Jakub Gierszal) plays guitar. (Note that the band may not actually be a family; I made an educated guess, given their varying ages and familiarity.) They entertain the crowd on a lit dance floor (the kind seen in Saturday Night Fever), while the curmudgeonly club manager, Kierownik (Zygmunt Malanowicz) looks on. Kierownik smells something fishy (literally), and journeys through the entire club, Goodfellas-style, until he finds the source in the locked green room: two teenaged girls, completely naked (save for jackets), singing and dancing.
The manager confronts the band members; the girls look underage and this a bar where people disrobe. The drummer then shows Kierownik something. He takes off the girls’ jackets and displays to the manager how the girls have no sexual organs: “smooth as Barbie dolls.” And when he pours waters on the girls’ legs, they slowly transform into monstrous fish tails. The owner’s eyes light up with dollar signs: what a perfect burlesque act! He decides maybe they don’t smell so bad, after all. The band returns to the stage, leaving the house manager with the mermaids.
Figs ’n’ Dates play “The Banana Song” as a woman in a blonde bob does a strip tease. But before the song is over, the house manager frantically beckons Krysia. He takes the band backstage, where the two girls have passed out on the floor, looking very human. He swears he did nothing, but pouring water on them no longer works. They take the girls to a nearby pool and dump them in, transforming them back to their mer-selves. We learn the two mermaids are sisters: Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek). They agree to join Figs ’n’ Dates at the club. But first – they’re gonna’ need some clothes. Cue up-tempo music number!
In a surreal technicolour sequence, Golden and Silver dance their way through retail stores with a cast of dozens and sing about how they love the bustle of the human world. However, Silver soon spins herself silly and passes out. (They probably can’t be out of water for too long.) Mietek tends to her, and Golden looks on in concern. Later, the mermaids telepathically communicate with one another via whale noises, and decide they should stick around Poland for a while before heading to America. Golden asks Silver what will happen if she falls in love with Mietek? Will she be able to eat him? (Wait, what?)
The mermaids have their first performance with the band, before which the house manager weirdly faux-mounts everyone in the group. (Shades of #metoo.) Krysia is dressed like a pilot and Golden and Silver are flight attendants in a number that looks like a more jaunty Matthew Barney piece. (I would go to strip clubs if they were this much fun!) Mid-song, Golden and Silver hop into a massive champagne glass and transform into their mermaid selves. The crowd gives them a standing ovation, and Golden and Mietek kiss at the end of the song. Krysia says she’s proud of her girls, and Golden immediately leaves without notice.
When she returns, Golden broods in front of the toilet and a beach landscape that hangs above it. Moving through a frozen tableau of her new makeshift family, she sings about being lonesome and having “unwholesome cravings.” “We’re all gloomy as hell,” she croons, gothing up the place a bit. Golden then returns to the bar and locks eyes with a man in a leather jacket. She pretty much growls as she pursues him. The two leave in his car.
Silver, meanwhile, tries to find where her sister went. She looks into the keyhole of the locked bathroom and spies Krysia performing oral sex on Perkusista, but no Golden. Instead, she finds a hard-living older woman who offers her a first cigarette. Golden, of course, is at the riverside, murdering her date in his car. She bites at his neck and blood smears all over the windshield. Golden then escapes, slithering out of the car and dragging herself down to the water.
Mietek – who looks like a cross between Tal Bachman and Cone from Sum 41 – asks to speak to Silver alone, so they retreat to the washroom. Silver immediately ditches her clothes and runs the bath. She slides in, turning mermaid, and tells Mietek to “put it in.” But he refuses. “To me, you’ll always be a fish, an animal,” he says. As much as he loves her, he’s repulsed by her fish half. She then picks off a scale from her body (I think?) and passes it to him, saying it will make him a talented bassist. They kiss, and Silver breaks into a song about paying attention to your loved one. The washroom serenade turns into the two (not-quite) lovers playing the song together, with Silver playing a key-tar! (When did she learn that?) He then joins Silver in the bathtub, which turns into the ocean. And while they swim under the water, it’s implied that Silver performs fellatio on him. Both Mietek and Silver arrive back at their family apartment, soaking wet.
Golden returns home, as well, and Silver spots the blood on her lips. “It was a cow,” she insists. By now, the mermaids have taken to calling their musical act The Lure, and they perform a new stage number. Their new song sounds like techno Mussorgsky, and sees them dressed like Pris from Blade Runner. The sisters engage in some t.A.T.u.-esque faux-lesbian antics during the song, and the crowd licks it up, pumping their fists and dancing more wildly than drunken uncles at a Polish wedding.
Following the performance, the sisters sit at the bar. Seated at the far end is another sea creature of some kind, a tattooed man with a shaven head named Tryton (Marcin Kowalczyk). He points out he once had horns, but had one broken off by a boat, and the other one, he removed himself. He has a band (of course he does) and thinks the mermaids should join his group. He also warns them, in a overt bit of exposition, that if they were ever to lose their fish tails, they would also lose their voices. Silver goes to make out with Mietek, and Golden glowers at them. That’s when Tryton gives her another important bit of information: if the mermaids ever fall in love, and their lover marries another, they will turn to sea foam. (But, like, what are the odds of that happening?)
Golden leaves the club via an alleyway and police woman in a leather trench coat who looks a lot like PJ Harvey stops her, saying she’s wanted in connection with a murdered man. In response, Golden starts to sing and dance, which leads the police woman to sing with her, flirting and teasing the human mermaid. They then drive back to the police woman’s house, where the detective splashes Golden with water and reveals her tail. What follows is an erotic encounter, with the detective licking along the mermaid’s tail and writhing atop her, all while fittingly wearing fishnets. The scene ends with Golden revealing her fangs and the detective pointing a gun to Golden’s head when she does. We only hear the detective’s scream.
If that weren’t odd enough for you, Krysia has a dream sequence while making love to Perkusista. She envisions herself as a mermaid, breast-feeding her two mermaid proteges. (I’m pretty sure this is a Tori Amos album cover.) When she awakes from her fantasy, she accuses her partner of smelling like fish and storms out of the bedroom in a huff. At the door, she encounters Silver and Mietek, walking in late, and slaps Mietek across the face.
When the whole gang is back at home, Perkusista turns up the radio for a special request he made for his love, Krysia. He air-drums poorly and the mermaids air-horn (also poorly) – they’re all very bad at air instruments – in the hopes of getting on his love’s good side again. But as soon as the song ends, they see a television report of a murder in Warsaw, with evidence of both human and reptilian tracks at the scene. Golden immediately flicks her cigarette at Mietek and goes to her room. Silver makes a scene about not being able to go roller skating or to a restaurant like a normal teen, trying to deflect everyone else’s worries. Perkusista calls her a brat, and she follows Golden into the bedroom.
Inside their room, the two mermaids hiss like cats and grapple one another. They throw each other about the room until their surrogate father, Perkusista, enters and punches them both in the face, knocking them out cold. Then the family rolls the mermaids up in carpets and tosses them off a dock.
Mietek immediately feels ill about how they handled the situation, and vomits at the dockside. When the family returns home, they erupt into a massive domestic brawl, with father fighting son, son fighting father. Perkusista eventually clocks Krysia in the head, and the family in crisis collapses. That’s because – it turns out – someone (possibly the blonde burlesque dancer from the start) poisoned them all. She enters the hazy apartment, singing a song about poison (but not by Poison), and hooks IVs up to each band member’s arms. (This scene is never again mentioned or resolved in the film. Next we see the band, they’re totally fine.)
Golden and Silver, meanwhile, have lured two young men to the outskirts of town. They both rip the hearts from the men’s chests and begin to chow down. But eventually, during a terrible rainstorm, they return to the club. Backstage, Silver immediately embraces Mietek as he brushes his teeth. Perkusista apologizes to Golden, who assures him they’re not angry. She then bites off his thumb, causing him to whimper and blood to spurt everywhere.
That night, Silver pounds back drinks at the bar and drunkenly tells a bearded man she’s trading in her tail for “real legs.” Golden, meanwhile, goes to Tryton’s punk show. Tryton, now with a mohawk, invites her to sing with his sax-based thrash metal band. Golden has a blast, but as they depart the stage, Tryton leans in to whisper, “You need a lot of practice.”
While the mermaids pose for a Playboy photo shoot with a German photographer, they telepathically discuss their future. Golden warns Silver she shouldn’t get rid of her tail, as she’ll lose her voice, but Silver doesn’t believe in the old superstitions. She warns Golden not to get involved. So Mietek and Silver go to some underground surgeon, pay him off in bottles of wine, and ask him to perform the difficult full torso transplant. Silver sings a song through the gory surgery. The surgeon saws off her tail, then sews on the lower half of some poor corpse (the origin of which is never mentioned or questioned).
Next we see Silver, she cannot speak – the legends were true – and she’s in a wheelchair. She uses a treadmill to slowly learn how to use her new legs. Mietek returns to their bright new home, toting flowers: a portrait of domestic bliss. They embrace and decide to try to test out her new lower-half. Silver pulls up her dress, revealing a particularly nasty abdominal scar, and the young lovers begin to kiss. They start to make love like two humans, but Silver’s stitches pull and Mietek gets blood on his crotch. Repulsed once again – so easily repulsed, this guy! – he leaves.
At the club, the band tries to decide what to do, now that Silver can’t sing. She could lip-synch, but Kierownik has standards in his exploitative sex club. And Golden won’t sing solo. Meanwhile, Mietek runs into another female singer, Rakieta (Roma Gasiorowska), at his recording studio. They start to talking and, as The Fixx once said, one thing leads to another … Moments after Mietek clasps her buttocks, he pulls Silver’s mystical mermaid scale out of his pocket and drops it down the drain.
The film cuts to Meitek and Rakieta’s wedding – ironically on a docked riverboat – to which all our characters have been invited: the mermaids, the parents (looking pretty strung out), Tryton, even that poisoner lady from before! They must have really been trying to hit that bar minimum. (“Honey, what was the name of that woman who poisoned us? Put her on the list!”) Mietek and Rakieta sing at their own wedding, like the total douches they are, and worse – they sing a song written by The Lure!
Tryton warns Silver she needs to eat the groom by daybreak, but she can’t respond in words. (I guess her telepathy has also disappeared.) As dawn arrives, Silver asks Mietek for a slow dance, and the two of them sway to music. Silver’s face turns into the monster mermaid version, her sharp teeth protruding. Golden looks on to observe the death stroke.
But Silver can’t do it. She relaxes and just holds Mietek closer and they continue to rock. But as the song ends, he looks down and sees he’s covered in sea foam. “What the fuck?!” he shouts, and Silver dissolves into foam. In the confusion, Golden leaps onto Mietek and viciously tears out his throat with her teeth, in full view of the entire wedding party. She races to the water, looks back once, then dives into the deep.
Takeaway points:
- Though the film is set in 1980s Warsaw, it follows a number of the tropes of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. As with the traditional story, the mermaid loses her voice when she gives up her fish tail for legs. (Though in this case, an unethical surgeon has replaced a sea-witch.) Also, the fairy tale notes that if the mermaid kills her prince and lets his blood fall on her feet, she will become a mermaid again. But she can’t bring herself to do so and turns into foam. (Obviously, this is more Silver’s story. Golden’s story is almost like a Choose-Your-Own Adventure of the fairy tale, where she does all the selfish things that keep her alive.)
- Though both leads (Mazurek and Olszanska) are incredible in roles that truly ask a lot of them, the sisterly dynamic is – by this point – somewhat tiresome. Much as in Ginger Snaps and, more recently, academic cannibal film Raw, one sister indulges in her more bestial impulses. She embraces the monster he is supposed to be – killing people, taking dangerous risks – while the other is frightened by her monstrosity and works to be selfless and act more “human.” This tension pits the sisters against one another, which propels much of the film’s narrative. And that works – it’s just that there are other sisterly dynamics to be explored. (I’m almost sure of it.) Women don’t fall naturally into neat binaries, despite what hundreds of years of Catholicism may have told you.
- More horrific than any of the films so far, The Lure is the first movie I’ve watched this month directed by a woman: Agnieszka Smoczynska. Fittingly The Lure plays with the male gaze. The mermaids are alluring as burlesque dancers, but they are also heart-eating, throat-ripping monsters who probably don’t like you much. Likewise, the film interrogates male attitudes toward female sexuality. Mietek is attracted to the nude, hairless (and orifice-less) body of Silver. But he’s disgusted by her fish half. (The film specifies that man and mermaid can have sex; Mietek is just grossed out by it.) And if you weren’t sure if this were some sort of metaphor for human women’s bodies, with all their fluids and hidden parts, there’s the later scene where Mietek is repelled by Silver’s blood when they attempt to have sex once she’s fully human. (I wonder what that scene could symbolize …)
- About two songs into The Lure, I noted the musical numbers were way catchier and worked better in the context than in Academy Award winner La La Land. This is the killer mermaid musical La La Land wished it could be.
Truly terrifying or truly terrible?: Though there are certainly elements of horror in The Lure, and even horrific scenes, the film isn’t scary overall. Just intense. I loved the musical elements, but it’s too uneven to be amazing. The plot threads that disappear and forced exposition make it difficult to recommend, but it’s certainly worth watching.
Best outfit: Krysia has an electric blue sequinned pantsuit that I would die for.
Best line: “Remember: give it 100%. But not 200 or 300%.” – Perkusista, giving musical advice. I also like the line of The Lure’s song that goes “They promised Frutti di Mari. / But now we’re feeling sorry.”
Best kill: The final kill is the best and goriest. And really, when you perform a song at your own wedding, you should expect to have your throat torn out.
Unexpected cameo: The house manager of the club is played by Zygmunt Malanowicz, best known as the hitchhiker in the breakout hit from Roman Polanski (I know; I’m sorry), Knife in the Water. That movie was released so long ago, he was billed as “Young Man.”
Unexpected lesson learned: In 1980s Warsaw, for three bottles of booze, you could get a surgeon to do literally anything.
Most suitable band name derived from the movie: Figs ’n’ Dates.
Next up: Blood and Black Lace (1964).