The Lure

Agnieszka Smoczyńska's audacious feature debut, The Lure (2015), is a horror-musical about carnivorous mermaids. It won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and found a devoted cult following almost immediately. It riffs loosely on Hans Christian Andersen by way of 1980s disco, and it is one of the strangest and most exhilarating genre films in recent European cinema.

Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska play the siren sisters who surface in a seedy Warsaw nightclub, where they sing, seduce and occasionally devour, in a film that swerves between glam musical numbers, body horror and fairy-tale melancholy. Smoczyńska draws on her own memories of growing up around such clubs and soaks the screen in lurid colour and synth-pop, using the mermaid myth to get at female adolescence, appetite and the dangers of love. The tonal whiplash is entirely deliberate.

Critics were dazzled by its originality and by its commitment to its own bizarre logic, and it has since become a midnight-movie staple. It is funny and frightening, and more poignant than a film with this much blood has any right to be: a coming-of-age story with teeth, glitter and a great deal of nerve. The Lure announced Smoczyńska as one of the boldest new voices in twenty-first-century Polish cinema, and few debuts from anywhere in Europe have been so sure of what they wanted to be.