The Lure

One dark night, at water’s edge, a family of musicians encounter aquatic sirens Silver and Golden. After assuring the family that they won’t eat them up, the winsome mermaids are recruited to join the Figs and Dates band at a neon-lit Warsaw dance club. When Silver becomes romantically entangled with beautiful blonde bassist Mietek, the more cunning Golden, who cannot escape her bloodthirsty nature and assimilate, worries that her sister’s relationship will doom their shared dream of swimming to a new life in America.

This weird, wild, 1980s-set musical horror film wittily plays with the lust and repulsion the bewitching sisters create with their combination of Barbie doll–smooth bodies and impressively long glittering mermaid tails. With a knack for both burlesque and the grotesque, first-time feature director Agnieszka Smoczynska creates a world saturated in color and Europop slickness that twists with absurdity and drips with blood.