Did you know that mermaids were once evil? Many believed that the Sirens in Homer’s The Odyssey were actually mermaids, and that mermaids lured ships off course to crash upon the rocks. This point of view began to change with Hans Christen Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, where mermaids were kind and benevolent half-fish who just wanted to fall in love with human beings. The Lure takes all the various mermaid mythologies and gleefully throws them into a blender to come out as a sexy gothic europop musical of comedy and horror.
Golden and Silver live in shallow waters luring men to their doom with their nubile half-naked sexuality and siren song. Thy croon at the men to join them. Don’t be afraid; the mermaids will not eat them, and come visit their sexy sexy bodies in the shallow waters where…yup, the mermaids eat the men with sharp pointy teeth. Never trust a mythological creature.
The mermaids are discovered by an aging disco queen during their latest feeding frenzy upon the chanteuse’s backing band. Befriending the chanteuse, they’re put to work in an adult cabaret where they sing and dance around in sailor suits (or less) and champagne glasses. The mermaids are able to blend because, despite their fishy odor, they’re able to change out their fins for human legs when dry enough.
But, all is not well. Silver begins to fall in love with a human man while Golden longs to return to the waters where she can continue feasting on men. Silver’s journey is complicated by the problem that their vaginas and anuses are on their tail formation, and not their legs formation. She longs to be a human woman with a real vagina so that a human will love her. But, what must she sacrifice?
First-time director Agnieszka Smoczyńska is well versed in the music video, filling each frame with candy-colored formalism that echoes everything from The Apple to The Hunger to Excision. When introducing the nightclub’s color-coded rooms, the steadycam single-shot takes as much from The Shining as it does from Boogie Nights. The Lure is drenched in cinematic echoes and hallways, while reworking them into a semi-feminist screed about the choices women have to make throughout their lives. A shot of the two mermaids nursing on the disco queen’s breasts, like babies to a mother, is as creepy and funny as it sounds, asking the question about the roles that people think they play in each other’s lives.
Though the mermaids are going through familiar waters, The Lure constantly diverges into vignettes that have little to do with the story. When the mermaids are first hired, they go on an extended shopping spree accompanied by a zesty musical number. Smoczyńska shifts tonalities on a dime, butting poppy disco songs right up against industrial rock music. At times, The Lure threatens to break apart into kaleidoscopic nonsense where little makes sense and you’re just along for the gorgeous ride. But, fear not, because Smoczyńska actually has a plan all along. She swaps from Rocky Horror to Horror on a dime, not giving one whit if you can’t handle the change because that’s what life is about. You have to roll with the punches, and you may be up one day but down another. She knows that The Lure is ultimately about the relationship between Golden and Silver, even if they each have lives of their own to deal with.
In terms of visually stunning cult oddities, The Lure holds its own with enough wit and weirdness to entertain those who can get on its wavelength. It’s a strange wavelength, but one that is easily identifiable to many people. Just give it a chance. It won’t bite.
