The Lure: A Retelling with Even More Heartbreak

The Lure is a 2015 film by Agnieszka Smoczyńska

Today we share a post by Timmie Escobedo, a student in our Summer 2026 Introduction to the Fairy Tale course.

Hi everyone, my name is Timmie Escobedo. I am a (hopefully) lifelong learner and SMC student. At the root of it, I've always enjoyed stories – I think storytelling is how we make meaning of our experience in the world. 

I wanted to write about Agnieszka Smoczyńska's 2015 fairy tale / musical / horror film called The Lure. (Streamable on tubi.) This fairy tale / horror / musical / coming-of-age crossover has not left my mind since I first watched it. Angela Lovell called it a "a colorful, exuberant, and absurdist genre experiment" in her essay, The Lure: One Is Silver and the Other Gold. A "genre experiment" is a great way to describe this movie musical that defies conventional frameworks and blends them all into one queer feminist horror film.

Rather than the Little Mermaid exploring the human world on her own, in The Lure sisters Golden and Silver choose to enter the strange, seedy human world together. Emerging from a riverbank, they face exploitation, a search for love and community, and ultimately heartbreak during their time in 1980-something Poland. It is, of course, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's story, "The Little Mermaid," so a tragic ending should not be a surprise (even if it is still enraging).

The Lure might best be summed up as a story about the bond of sisterhood that manages to squeeze even more heartbreak out of a story like the Little Mermaid through witnessing the relationship between the sisters. Silver is so in love she is content to let the object of her affection live, even if it means her demise: there is the bittersweet, self-sacrificing pleasure in suffering for love, which is present in Andersen's original work. For Golden, her suffering is bound up in watching her sister sacrifice integral parts of herself, parts of their relationship together, to try and mold herself into the shape of something that could gain the desire of her beloved. It expands the heartbreak from one of simple yearning for the person who cannot love you back (which is potent and true), to watching someone you love dearly love someone else to their tragic end, powerless to change the course of events. It is far more bitter than sweet and steeped in the ache of loss and frustrated anger. Despite all the power these mermaids can exert over men and humans as clearly capable predators, there is no saving someone who does not want to be saved. And though Golden can exact her immediate revenge, which does feel like a small catharsis unavailable in Andersen's original work, it's a nominal recompense that does nothing to bring Silver and her singing voice back. After losing her sister, Golden has no choice but to go on in the world solo, without her singing partner – which is the pain of heartbreak without the self-sacrificing pleasure of unrequited romance.