The Lure is a 2015 film from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska that’s finally enjoying a theatrical run stateside this month. It is an aggressively weird and unsettling film, a musical comedy that is almost never funny and never all that musical, even with half a dozen song and dance routines. It is mostly a washed-out, glam-grunge descent into surreal depravity where romance, tragedy, lust, and alienation intermingle in a bizarre alt-world filled with slime and cigarette smoke.
 

Singing/dancing/man-eating sister act Silver and Golden
 
The story involves two young mermaid sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who use their siren song to lure a couple of low-rent musicians to a Warsaw beach to rescue them from the briny deep. They join the band as a singing/dancing mermaid sister act and perform nightly in a dingy cabaret show that looks like some zero-budget post-Soviet nightmare of polyester and short-circuiting synthesizers. When they dry out they grow legs, but they’re smooth like Barbie dolls from the waist down. Silver falls in love with the curly-haired guitar player in the band but has no human genitals to offer him. She does have a goopy fish vagina on her tail, but he’s not into that. Luckily, they find an off the grid doctor willing to perform radical fish-to-human surgery. Golden does not approve and starts going out nightly to feast on the local hornballs in protest. All of this high weirdness is bracketed with kooky cabaret numbers that sound like they just discovered disco a week ago and are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. I mean, this film really does have it all.
 

Another quiet night in Warsaw
 
If you only see one Polish man-eating mermaid musical this year, for chrissakes let it be The Lure...
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Super bizarre fully-functional ‘mermaid’ guitar