Every once in a while, a movie comes along that critics hail as “bold,” “visionary,” and “genre-defying,” which is usually code for “you won’t understand it, but please pretend you do.” The Lure (2015) is that movie — a Polish horror musical about carnivorous mermaids who become nightclub strippers in 1980s Warsaw. It’s like The Little Mermaid directed by David Lynch after three bottles of vodka and a head injury.
Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s debut film swims through the deep waters of body horror, feminism, and synth-pop nostalgia — and promptly drowns in all of them. Critics loved it. I suspect that’s because none of them wanted to admit they had no idea what was going on.
The Plot: The Little Mermaid on Acid
Two sirens, Golden and Silver, crawl out of the sea and immediately get a gig as backup singers at a Polish strip club, because apparently in 1980s Poland, job markets were booming. They sing, they dance, they snack on human organs — all in a day’s work for a murderous sea creature with abs.
Silver falls in love with Mietek, a bassist who looks like he hasn’t slept since the Cold War started. He’s handsome in that “I smell faintly of vodka and regret” way, which seems to be Silver’s type. Unfortunately, Mietek doesn’t reciprocate her affections because — and this is a direct quote from his soul — “you’re a fish.”
Golden, the more practical sister, responds to heartbreak by murdering random bar patrons. It’s the kind of sibling contrast that makes Frozen look emotionally stable.
Things escalate. Silver decides to undergo a tail-ectomy to win Mietek’s love, even after Triton (yes, there’s a Triton, and yes, he’s in a punk band because of course he is) warns her that she’ll lose her voice. She goes through with it anyway, loses her voice, and immediately regrets it when Mietek reacts to their first intimate moment like someone discovering a fish head in his soup.
It all ends with a wedding, a murder, and one mermaid turning into sea foam, which — depending on your patience — may or may not feel like the film’s most merciful moment.
The Aesthetic: Drown Me, But Make It Pretty
To give credit where it’s due, The Lure looks fantastic. The lighting, the costumes, the retro nightclub setting — it’s like Cabaret met Jaws at a thrift store. Every scene is drenched in neon and sweat, which is either a metaphor for lust or just Poland in the 1980s.
The cinematography is so stylish that it almost distracts you from the fact that the story makes about as much sense as a karaoke version of Nietzsche. The camera swoons, the editing pulsates, the synths hum — and somehow, none of it adds up to emotion. It’s like watching an art school final project that got a government grant and a hangover.
Smoczyńska’s direction is confident, sure — but confident nonsense is still nonsense.
The Music: Fishy Business
Since it’s a musical horror film, the soundtrack is supposed to carry the emotional weight. Instead, it feels like a playlist curated by Poseidon after a bad breakup.
The songs swing wildly between disco, power ballads, and murder anthems. One minute, the mermaids are singing about love; the next, they’re harmonizing over a corpse. It’s like Mamma Mia! if everyone was bleeding.
The choreography doesn’t help either — it looks like a middle-school talent show possessed by demons. The dancers thrash around as though their limbs are being controlled by an invisible squid, which, honestly, might be the most plausible explanation.
The Performances: Commitment Meets Confusion
Marta Mazurek (Silver) and Michalina Olszańska (Golden) throw themselves into their roles with admirable abandon. They hiss, they flail, they sing, they eat people — truly a full workout routine. They’re great at looking otherworldly and slightly annoyed, which sums up the audience’s experience as well.
Jakub Gierszał, as Mietek the bassist, manages to give one of the flattest performances ever recorded by man or fish. His chemistry with Silver is so nonexistent it could be studied in a lab. You could replace him with a damp cardboard cutout and the emotional range would be identical.
Then there’s Triton, played by Marcin Kowalczyk — shirtless, tattooed, and looking like Aquaman’s unemployed cousin. His scenes are loud, confusing, and weirdly hypnotic, much like the rest of the movie.
Symbolism, or “Sure, Why Not”
If you ask fans what The Lure is about, they’ll tell you it’s a feminist allegory about exploitation, desire, and the commodification of the female body. Which is true — in the same way that Cats is about existential dread.
Yes, it’s a film about women being objectified, but it’s also a film that spends half its runtime showing them topless and chewing on neck arteries. It’s empowerment through homicide, I guess.
The “losing your voice for love” metaphor from The Little Mermaid is still there, but now it’s wrapped in a layer of blood and glitter so thick it’s hard to tell whether you’re supposed to feel sad or start a mosh pit.
Tone: The Real Horror
Tonally, the film flops like a carp on land. One scene plays like a fairy-tale romance; the next feels like a cannibalistic nightmare scored to disco synth. The horror elements are too silly to be scary, the comedy too awkward to be funny, and the musical numbers too bizarre to be catchy.
It’s like Grease got eaten by The Shape of Water and regurgitated onto VHS.
The Pacing: A Slow Death by Glitter
At just under two hours, The Lure somehow feels twice as long. The pacing drags whenever it’s not exploding into neon chaos. There are moments of brilliance — quick flashes of visual poetry — but they vanish faster than Silver’s will to live.
By the halfway mark, you’ve stopped trying to make sense of it. By the third act, you’re rooting for the mermaids to just eat everyone and roll credits.
When the finale arrives — Silver turning into foam while Golden rips out her boyfriend’s throat — it’s supposed to be tragic. Instead, it feels like a relief, as if the movie itself finally gave up.
Critical Praise: The Emperor’s New Gills
Of course, The Lure was adored by critics. It played at Sundance, where everyone pretended to be haunted by its “subversive blend of genre.” Translation: no one understood it, but it had subtitles, so it must be genius.
It’s one of those arthouse films people praise loudly in public and secretly Google “ending explained” later. The reviews call it “bold” and “original.” They’re not wrong — it’s definitely original. But so is salmon-flavored toothpaste, and I don’t want that either.
Final Verdict: Hook, Line, and Sinker
The Lure is less a movie and more an endurance test for people who thought The Shape of Water needed more blood, nudity, and karaoke. It’s stylish, yes, but style without sense is just chaos in lipstick.
If you like your musicals incoherent, your mermaids homicidal, and your symbolism drowning in vodka, then this might be your masterpiece. For everyone else, it’s a 92-minute acid trip that smells faintly of seawater and regret.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 gurgling sirens.
It’s not so much The Little Mermaid as The Little Mistake.
