Rapid Response: The Lure (Patreon)

The Lure is a Polish film and a dark horror musical take on The Little Mermaid in which a pair of man-eating mermaids perform as singers/strippers at an underground club. I watched this on DVD recently because someone gave it to me on DVD and it’s hard to compare it to anything else I’ve ever seen. I really love the first scene, which I think is effectively eerie, and there’s some good moments of horror, but the nightclub and band stuff I’m less sold on. 

First thing you can’t avoid, there is a lot of nudity – although, is it still nudity if mermaids in human form (with legs) don’t have certain essential human bits? Ariel’s quest for legs and a voice is replaced in this with a quest to be able to have sex with her bandmate boyfriend. It’s less sexy and more uncomfortable – the actors are both in their twenties but they’re played as very childlike. Then there’s the songs. Of course they are in Polish so I’m reading the subtitles and that no way to appreciate a song, so from the normal musical perspective of storytelling through music they can’t really work for me. Even so, I didn’t find them catchy or memorable and it was slightly odd that some were songs sung by the band – in the context of the film – others were more traditional ‘musical’ songs – people bursting into song to make a point. Making those two work together is a bit tricky. The storytelling itself is surprisingly low key, it’s very non-explanatory, everything happens in a matter of fact way, no one ever tells us what is going on – in fact the humans are surprisingly unsurprised by the presence of a pair of mermaids in their midst. This is a style of storytelling I usually appreciate – don’t tell the audience, just let the situation play-out and we’ll pick it up – but in this case I struggled with it a bit. Maybe it was the language barrier or maybe it’s just hard to accept that sort of storytelling in a fantasy/horror context – I was constantly waiting for someone to say ‘What the fuck! Is no one else thinking this is a bit weird?’.

As you expect form European horror it is both bloody and tragic, and it looks great – although you start to wonder if it’s ever day time. I definitely think it’s worth watching but I’d be surprised if anyone could have any real passion for it – unless perhaps you’re Polish.