Critics reviews

The resulting film, with its wildly original soundtrack that glides from wistful ballads to disco to show tunes to Europop to punk, is a colorful, exuberant, and absurdist genre experiment that introduces a distinctive new directorial sensibility in Smoczyńska. You can practically taste the salt water—and the blood.

It's an electro-thump musical of longing and sadness, anchored by a struggle with national identity that spreads the bass of the theatre to the butt of your seat. Taking influence from the mystics of old—as seen in the storybook images through the opening credits—to 90s and early 2000s music videos, The Lure is one of the most seductive starring vehicles for a nonexistent diva duo in years.

Drawing inspiration from the dark fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking, and the director's own childhood memories of Communist-era Poland, Smoczyńska's debut feature is a provocative, extravagantly imagined take on the female coming-of-age story.

It's one of those perverse, intense, facetious yet perfectly earnest films that never stops having a good time—although its relentlessness means that the viewer might feel inclined to bow out of the festivities every now and then. It all feels very fragmentary, a torrent of bright ideas for the hell of it.

The preceding sequence, in which Silver is prepped for her operation, is built around an overhead shot of two women being severed at the waist; this is emblematic of what The Lure is attempting: the ragged recombination of elements—specifically, myth and kitsch—on a molecular level. As cinematic Frankensteins go, it's far from seamless, but if the movies are where mad scientists get points for trying, this ambitious experiment in genre hybridity at least deserves some sympathetic dissection.

The strangest release of the young year, The Lure is a disco musical concerning a pair of carnivorous mermaids who come ashore in late Communist Warsaw. The movie is uneven and the allegory meanders but it is a remarkably assured debut, often quite funny and with some truly startling images.

Smoczynska concocts a refreshingly leftfield cinematic world that echoes the parallel universes of Yorgos Lanthimos's films. Unlike Lanthimos, though, Smoczynska more eagerly embraces the light-hearted nonsense of her cine-experiment, and without straining for metaphorical import. The Lure isn't just a luscious sci-fi mindfuck, but a musical unafraid of its own ridiculousness, with knowingly cheesy lyrics and dance numbers.

It glistens with sensuality and fairy tale melancholy and has rightfully been called among the year's best by many before me.

A very different kind of fairy-fishtail, might sing without any of the wistful irony: Polish tyro helmer Agnieszka Smoczynska's deeply dippy story of vampire mermaid sisters wreaking havoc above water gleefully shows off its cluttered collection of whosits and whatsits galore. Yet as it morphs restlessly from siren-shrill horror to Europop musical to, gradually, a loose but sincere riff on Hans Christian Andersen, it seems the pic may contain a thingamabob (or 20) too many.

The first and freshest film I saw at Sundance this year. It's an unabashedly loony genre mash-up of musical, romance, and '80s-style horror... Good fun through and through, this surprising delight from Smoczynska is nothing short of a stunning feature debut.

Be on the lookout for The Lure, a Polish film by first time director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, that absolutely corners the market on mermaid horror musicals.