The Little Mermaid, but make it a pervy horror movie…
Set in the 1980s, The Lure is a musical about sirens that eat people. Most of it takes place in a night club with neon lights, disco balls and strippers. This sounds campy and unique, and I can assure you that this movie is both of those things. Unfortunately, it’s sort of fucking depressing. The only saving grace here is that I’m fairly certain both the girls were over 18 when they filmed this, even though they’re playing underage children that are constantly being sexualized and exploited. Yep yep yep you heard me, let’s fucking do this before I lose my nerve.
The Lure is a mix between “The Little Mermaid” and a siren horror movie. Silver and Golden are siren sisters that wander on land and are “adopted” by a family band who performs in an adult nightclub. The mother of this band takes the sisters to their place of employment to keep an eye on them, and the club owner asks the girls to get naked. He marvels at their sex-organ free bodies, and pours water on them so they’ll transform and show their tails. He then immediately finds and fingers a hole in the tail that he thinks he can fuck. Yuuuuuuuuuuup.
The director of the movie said the casting process for these two girls took a year and a half to complete. Part of the problem was finding overage girls that looked “innocent” enough, as they are supposed to be underage virgins. She also talked about how they had classes to teach these girls to be comfortable naked, and act like they’re animals that don’t care about the human shame of nudity. When the club owners and other patrons are sexualizing them, they had to pretend they didn’t know what was happening. To say my stomach turned when I heard this…
These actresses also had to sing, and swim, and wear 90lb tails while they were performing these roles. I promise you, whatever these girls were paid, they didn’t make nearly enough.
Anyway, because Golden and Silver can sing and have the added novelty of being mermaids, they are recruited to perform with the band, strip naked, and get in water to show off their tits and tails. At first, they are excited by the prospect of experiencing the human world for the first time, but Golden starts to notice that Silver is attracted to the son in the family band, Mietek, and warns her that if she falls in love with him and doesn’t eat him, she’ll dissolve into foam.
Of course, Silver ignores this and falls in love with him anyway. She also decides to trade her fin for legs because Mietek told her he wants to fuck a human instead of a fish, and loses her ability to speak as a result. They finally do have sex in a truly repulsive, bloody scene and Silver gets dumped shortly afterwards because this dude falls in love with some other random girl.
Mietek and this girl decide to get married, and Golden again warns her sister if she doesn’t eat this dude, she’ll die. Silver decides she’d rather sacrifice her life for his happiness, and turns into foam. Golden absolutely loses her shit after the loss of her sister, kills Mietek by chewing his throat out, and swims away. Just three more victims of young love…
Like, OK, take my American puritan sensibilities out of the equation for a second, I get what the director was trying to do here. These girls start off innocent to their sexuality, but through other people’s sexualization of them, they start to understand the power they have. Golden uses it as a weapon to kill people, and Silver gets caught up in it, gives a major part of her identity away, loses her ability to speak for herself, and dies when this sacrifice is not reciprocated in love. I’m sure most women can relate to this experience – I’ve been Silver and I’ve been Golden. I understand what motivates them both, and emotionally connected with it. Silver’s love for this fuckboi is completely sincere and freely given, only for her to ultimately be abandoned by Mietek for someone who has not made those same sacrifices to be with him. It’s debilitating the first time you realize that men will ultimately disappoint you, and simultaneously humiliating identifying the concessions you’ll make to your own character for the chance of being loved. This movie does an excellent job of illustrating this anguish.
But just like… the entire fucking time every human in this world is constantly referring to the mermaids as children, while also advising Golden and Silver should strip slowly to tease the audience. All the adults around these girls are giving them alcohol and cigarettes and talking about how they must have wished they had the right sex organs to fuck humans. They take pictures of them in fishnet stockings and Playboy bunny ears. Nobody is protecting these girls. Even the mother, who has a really fucking creepy scene of the girls feeding from her breasts, capitalizes off of them by featuring them in her act, and then blames her husband for lusting after them. It’s painful to watch, and this whole movie turned into an exercise in me reliving trauma I haven’t processed. Remembering being in elementary school getting cat called by old men, hunching over to hide my breasts. It’s not a fun experience being sexualized by adults, and it happens a lot earlier in life than it does for these mermaids. They get the benefit of being sexualized without shame, at a time when both of them are ready to have sex. How fucking lucky. But as a viewer, I found it really difficult to overlook this fact and not get angry at the system that exists that allows for the sexualization and exploitation of young women, even curious young women, because it enables predators to take advantage of them. My inability to tap my toe along to this beat is really harshing my buzz.
Separate of the story content, The Lure is an inconsistent musical fever dream. I actually can’t show you a lot of the songs to prove my point because there is so much nudity this post would get flagged. While watching the first “traditional” musical number my heart sank, because it was filmed SO MUCH like Dancer in the Dark. The camera focused on the two girls looking around at clothes instead of the hundreds of extras dancing around them in a department store. Thankfully, the rest of the songs are shot in completely different styles (to this song and to each other). Golden’s solo number where she explores her constant desire to eat people (which again, can’t link because she’s completely naked in it), is filmed with her walking around the set while everyone else in the frame is frozen. It shows her isolation from her sister and the human world. Even the shot of Golden transformed in the bathtub illustrates her inability to adapt to this society, because she quite literally cannot fit within it. These vignettes are framed absolutely beautifully.
Silver’s song while she’s undergoing the surgery to swap her tail for legs (can’t link, she’s naked and more importantly, it’s really fucking gruesome) is filmed as an aerial shot while she’s laying down on a 10-foot long ice bed, showing exactly how much she’s physically giving up after the legs replace her tail. The moment her tail is severed from her body, she loses her voice, and her sister Golden resumes the song to cheer her up. It’s horrific, gorgeous, and heartbreaking at the same time.
All the underwater scenes, also, were excellent and fascinating to watch, because even while singing, these girls looked completely natural in their habitat. Again, whatever they were paid, it was not enough.
But imagine my surprise when I watched the making-of documentary and they fucking cited Lars von Trier as an inspiration. The director had never shot a musical, which she said gave them the ability to play around with format! The problem with this is that you get an incoherent mess of visual and audio problems, like the fucking layering of the girls voices, and then reverb, and whale and seal noises, and high-pitched squeaking, and the warbly horror ambiance, all on top of the songs themselves. In my notes I think it was 5 minutes into the movie before I said I was already sick of the audio mixing, and it did not. get. better. There is also a duet between Silver and Mietek that shows them dancing in this awkward panning shot that is weirdly voyeuristic instead of this intimate number where Silver is offering herself to him. She’s literally singing about how Mietek should watch her closely and learn her movements, but the shot is obstructed with chairs and pillars? How hard is it to hire just ONE PERSON who knows ANYTHING about the musical movie format to advise the creative and technical teams? Again and again on this list…
Right, so, final thoughts: The Lure is another one of those depressing European musical movies that sort of stumbles along in its execution of that format, but succeeds in its emotional depth and message. And separate from how the songs are filmed, the music itself is really good.