The Lure

The audacious feature debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, The Lure (2015) is a horror-musical about carnivorous mermaids that won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and became an instant cult favourite. Loosely riffing on Hans Christian Andersen by way of 1980s disco, it is one of the strangest and most exhilarating genre films of recent European cinema.

Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska play the sister sirens 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, drawing on her own memories of growing up around such clubs, drenches the screen in lurid colour and synth-pop, using the mermaid myth to explore female adolescence, appetite and the perils of love. The tonal whiplash is entirely deliberate.

Critics were dazzled by its originality and its commitment to its own bizarre logic, and it has since become a midnight-movie staple. Lurid, funny, frightening and unexpectedly poignant, The Lure announced a bold new voice in Polish cinema. It is the rare genre mashup that fully earns its eccentricity — a coming-of-age story with teeth, glitter and a great deal of blood. It has become a beloved midnight-movie staple, and Smoczyńska's fearless commitment to its own bizarre logic announced one of the boldest new voices to emerge from twenty-first-century Polish cinema.