If only any of these movies had tried to rework traditionally family-friendly fairy tale elements into as warped of a creation as The Lure, maybe even the bad ones would have at least stuck around in your mind. Love it or hate it, I doubt anyone's walking away from The Lure going "Oh, that wasn't very memorable". The fairy tale that The Lure is using as a springboard for its storyline is Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid as mermaids Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszanska) are hired to be strippers and singers for a club in Poland. They have beautiful voices and patrons are enchanted by these two human ladies who reveal their mermaid form when you pour water on the lower half of their bodies.
Silver and Golden aren't just peaceful mermaids though, they also have a hankering for human flesh. This is a craving Silver is able to keep in check but Golden is way more susceptible to giving into her urges, which makes things...complicated. Further complications arise as Silver falls in love with a human boy which is a problem because if that boy falls in love with anyone else, Silver will turn into dust (a reference to the ending of the original Little Mermaid text). All of this is told through recurring musical numbers and when you combine that with a number of heavily violent sequences of mermaids disemboweling people, this handily becomes the most violent musical since Rock of Ages murdered all of those opportunities to actually have fun with its premise.
The Lure is such an unusual movie, that's obvious from the get-go. It's also heaps of fun to watch, mostly because it's full-on commitment to prominently utilizing musicals and horror elements stems from an obvious appreciation for both of those genres instead of just a desire to be "LOL, so random!!" This becomes apparent in how well-done the musical numbers are (an opening ditty about Silver and Golden discovering human city life is hysterically enjoyable) and also in the solid makeup and VFX work used to bring the gruesome murder sequences to life. Blood and showtunes go hand-in-hand in The Lure, a combination that may seem ridiculous on the surface, but if Sweeney Todd could pull off that mixture so well, why can't a pair of mermaids?
There's also a bunch of little touches throughout The Lure that just make it so memorable, namely the designs of the mermaids themselves. Whoever came up with the idea of making the bottom part of the mermaids look more like the body of an eel deserves a nice Christmas bonus, that's a great way to visually indicate how unsettling these mermaids are. Plenty of those tiny details also emerge from the performances of Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska, their chemistry together adds a lot to just how entertaining The Lure is. All of these elements are arranged under the direction of Agnieszka Smoczynska who occasionally evokes David Lynch in how her direction fully embraces all of the opportunities for unique visuals that the premise of her movie provides.
Admittedly, the second half of The Lure does lose some steam compared to what came before it as the musical numbers become more scarce and Robert Bolesto's script tries to incorporate a more conventional narrative into what's previously been a just a barrage of oddball imagery, musical numbers and kooky ideas with no premise to tie them down. Worry not though, The Lure still finds time for plenty of insanity in the second half of its story and it ends on a ghastly violent note that feels all too fitting for this delightfully preposterous project. If we had had more fairy tale updates as audacious and entertaining as The Lure, maybe that brief trend of darker fiary tales from earlier this decade would have gone on for far longer!
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