mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
In its native Poland, The Lure was released as Daughters of Dancing. That sounds like Daughters of Danzig. This is a movie I can imagine the offspring of Glenn Danzig being involved with. Danzig is also a place in Poland. At least, that’s what the Germans call it. It was founded by Teutonic Knights Templar. Its Polish name is Gdansk. That’s harder to say. Lots of Polish words are hard to say if you are not Polish or Czech.
Poland can be a pretty wild place. I had a brief relationship with a Polish girl named Kinga. I loved that name and she was ridiculously beautiful as far as I was concerned but she was also a bit scary. She’d never let me sit with less than two drinks at a time. She had a huge mouth and intense eyes and she seemed the kind of woman who might be capable of actually eating a man. I submitted myself to her craziness very willingly. The killer mermaids in this movie made me think of her a lot.
I’ve already said too much. The magic realism in The Lure swept my feet out from under me like a giant eel’s tail lashing through sand and then the music made me happy to hold my breath and stay under the water longer than strictly advisable. When I was a kid my folks gave me a special volume of Childcraft encyclopedia that was devoted to folk tales and the mythology of the sea. It had pictures of sailors being dragged under by mermaids but they always looked happy to be dying.
Odysseus wanted to be the only man to ever survive the sirens’ song so he got his crew to tie him to the mast and then fill all their ears with wax so they’d be immune as they rowed past the sirens’ lair. He left his own ears unprotected. As the music became audible, he thrashed until he bled against the timber and pleaded for his crewmates to cut him free so he could dive into the sea. When they refused (because this was all part of the plan), he cursed and threatened them. After leaving the vicinity of danger, Odysseus was cured of the urge to kill himself but a certain insanity never left him. Sometimes temptation can change a man, even if he doesn’t dash himself to pieces against its rocks.
