THE LURE: Red-band Trailer for Agnieszka Smoczynska's Superlative Musical

From Sundance to Sitges, The Lure was one of the purest delights on the festival circuit last year. The debut feature from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska is a thoroughly unorthodox adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, re-envisioned as a 1980s nightclub musical, with a healthy dose of blood and drugs and sex. The filmmaking is carried out with such confidence and brio that is is impressive to think that this is a feature film debut.

 

It's a literal, fish-out of water tale, set it in a burlesque club in 1980s Warsaw. A family of musicians, whose main gig is to play back-up for the strippers at a nightclub, discover two mermaids in the water while drinking and singing on the beach. They bring them aboard as part of their act, sort of like adopting two new children, and drop them right into the soft-core sex trade. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Check out the trailer below.  Janus is giving the film a limited release, in New York City for starters, at the IFC Center on February 1, 2017.