What Lurks Beneath

The Americans and Brits aboard this nuclear submarine must confront two enemies. One is a very real and very present danger. The other is fantastical. The mermaid that enters through a torpedo tube might have strange siren-like powers, but in the real-world, Russia is absolutely willing and capable of inflicting catastrophic damage on civilian populations—just look at the carnage of Mariupol. Give director Jamie Bailey and screenwriter Marcus Raul credit for calling out Russia by name, instead of making up a fictional nation. (Yet, this film still has a Russia language poster on imdb.) The crew might yet save the remnants of the free world, but their intruder represents an immediate pressing problem in Bailey’s What Lurks Beneath, which releases Friday on VOD.

The crew are American, but they also carry two British intelligence officers, who are the only people aboard who know of Russia’s devastating nuclear strike. Instead of leveling with Captain Banks, the British government orders them to trick the Americans into launching their payload. This seems like a dubious course of action, which understandably leads to complications. Unfortunately, the mermaid-like stowaway excels at exposing and exploiting such deception.

Nobody understands how she infiltrated the boat, but the naked woman is quite distracting for some of the sailors. She also seems to have a knack for literally getting inside men’s heads, through her eerie New Agey song. Again, the Brits, Brandon and Bradford, seem to understand who and what she is better than the Americans. At least Brandon feels somewhat guilty about all the secrets he keeps, since he has fallen for Ensign Nunnas, the medic. Nevertheless, he still needs those missiles to launch quickly, if he wants to save London from Putin.

Frankly, the techno-geopolitical aspects of Raul’s screenplay are a bit smarter than most genre films, but it is clear nobody associated with the film had any real-life experience with nuclear submarines. Still, Bailey manages to build quite a bit of suspense whether they can successfully launch in time.

Ironically, the mermaid, who expresses centuries old hostility to the male gender, acts as an unwitting ally to Putin, who has weaponized rape in the Ukraine and supported a rogues gallery of misogynistic Islamist thugs, such as Ramzan Kadyrov. Nunnas might have mentioned that fact when facing “Her,” but maybe that is asking for too much candor and global awareness in a film like this.

The King’s Daughter, Co-Starring Fan Bingbing

It is hard to get a good clean look at Fan Bingbing playing a heavily CGI’ed mermaid in this film, but it is easier to see her here than in China, where she is still being “rehabilitated” after the powers-that-be yanked her from the public eye and “detained” her for several months in 2018. (Subsequently, she has been considered to be one of the first celebrities to receive the “Peng Shuai treatment”). Nobody will call this a “comeback” vehicle, but it is certainly a curiosity piece. (You can also see the logo for the financially-precarious Evergrande’s liquidated film unit in the opening credits, for extra added notoriety.) Our protag—don’t call her the princess—forms a friendship with Fan’s weird mermaid in Sean McNamara’s The King’s Daughter, based on Vonda McIntyre’s novel, which opens today in theaters.

Louis XIV has just returned victorious from war, but a would-be assassin’s too-close-for-comfort bullet makes him suddenly mindful of his mortality. He is played by Pierce Brosnan, so apparently the Sun King was Irish. Who knew? The court doctor, who also dabbles in alchemy tells the king he can make him immortal, if his men can capture one of the mermaids living in the lost city of Atlantis. He needs to transplant its uncanny life force into the king—but it will only work with a full-grown female. Of course, she will die in the process, but he can live (forever) with that.

Meanwhile, Louis summons the secret love child he tucked away in a convent to serve as the court composer. Marie-Josephe D’Alembar is a rebellious klutz who could make even Katherine Hepburn say: “you could carry yourself with a bit more grace, kiddo.” She knows nothing of her true origins or her father’s intention to marry her off to a wealthy young nobleman. Instead, D’Alembar falls in love with Yves De La Croix, the slightly tarnished sea captain who captures the mermaid.

It is hard to believe this production was allowed to film on-location at Versailles, but they were, way back in 2014. Obviously, this has been on the shelf for years, for good reason. The effects are cheesy and so are the performances. Brosnan looks embarrassed and Kaya Scodelario’s Miss Maisel-ish portrayal of D’Alembar is ridiculously anachronistic. Honestly, Fan really doesn’t do anything except let the FX team superimpose her head on the big fish. Ironically, only William Hurt brings any sense of dignity to the film as the good Father La Chaise, an original character not in McIntyre’s novel.

Fantasia ’20: A Mermaid in Paris

Sailors know. There is a reason the old salts fear mermaids and sirens, because they really are out to get men. Lula assumes Gaspard Snow will be her latest victim, but the retro-crooner is weirdly immune to her siren song. Yet, she starts to fear for the broken-hearted entertainer’s life as cares for the beached creature in Mathias Malzieu’s A Mermaid in Paris, which screened during the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Snow would have been happier in the past, so he tries his best to live there. He and his father operate a secret nightclub in the lower deck of a houseboat that was founded by his grandmother and her associates, the Surprisers. During the National Socialist occupation, the Surprisers were an underground resistance cell, who also raised the city’s spirits by leaving whimsical toys on the street for children. Snow tries to keep their spirit alive, but that kind of chanson-elan is not widely appreciated these days.

After a late-night set, he finds Lula washed up on the river bank, with a clearly injured tail fin. The hospital refuses to examine her without a national insurance card, so he takes her back to his bath tub instead. Lula is amazed he can function at all, because her song has left several bewitched men ailing in their wake. She is even more impressed when he is still hail and hearty the next day. According to Snow, his last love affair left him heartbroken and immune to love. Lula is sort of happy to hear that, because she is starting to feel something for him.

Mermaid in Paris sounds like a conventional fish-out-of-water rom-com (which Lula literally is), but Malzieu’s visual approach is endlessly inventive. After seeing this film, it is clear he is the perfect director to tackle a film version of The Drowsy Chaperone. Best known for the animated Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart, Malzieu occasionally incorporates animation into Mermaid, but he really shows a knack for letting visual set pieces unfold before our eyes.

NYAFF ’16: The Mermaid

It is the highest grossing domestic film in China, easily surpassing Monster Hunt in a fracture of the time, without any sort of book-cooking game-playing. Therefore, it is probably safe to say demand for Stephen Chow slapstick lunacy is inexhaustibly rabid. Unfortunately, this one is a major disappointment. Brace yourself for the didacticism that drags down the manic spectacle of Chow’s The Mermaid (trailer here), starring Screen International Rising Star Asia Award Recipient Jelly Lin, which screens during the 2016 New York Asian Film Festival.

Liu Xuan is a flashy real estate developer, who just pulled off a coup. He plans to soon reclaim a protected stretch of coastal property after chasing away the dolphins with a super-strong sonar installation. I bet you always thought dolphins used sonar themselves, but fortunately Chow is here to correct your zoological misperceptions. Turns out they can’t stand the stuff and neither can a secret colony of mermaids. As their numbers dwindle, the mega-cute Shan is recruited to assassinate Liu using poisonous sea urchins.

However, Shan and Liu fall in love quicker than you can say Splash. Needless to say, this does not sit well with Ruolan, Liu’s on-again-off-again business partner and longtime flirting interest. She is also a major femme fatale, who is hatching a sinister plan of her own.

Let’s face it, The Mermaid should be way more fun than it is. Unfortunately, Chow just loses control of his message (aren’t you supposed to use Western Union to send those?), inflicting interminable scenes of Mermaids getting machine-gunned down (by primarily Anglo henchmen) on the audience. That’s right, there are a ton of dead mermaids in this film. Oh, such good times. At least he makes his environmental points with bludgeoning force.

The film’s saving grace is Kitty Zhang Yuqi’s wonderfully sassy and seductive performance as the villainous Ruolan. You won’t think from appearances in films like CJ7 she had such cattiness in her, but that is how she supplies ninety-five percent of the fun to be found in The Mermaid. Jelly Lin is also quite soulful and vulnerable as Shan, which makes it even more disturbing to see legions of mermen getting slaughtered around her. As for Deng Chao’s Liu, most viewers will want to stab him with a poisoned sea urchin after the first fifteen minutes.

To an extent, Chow deserves credit for directly criticizing China’s environmental protection policies—or lack thereof to be more accurate. By just about every objective measure, the People’s Republic is the dirtiest nation in the history of pollution. (Check out Beijing Besieged by Waste sometime, on an empty stomach.) However, when he starts literally stacking up the body bags filled with mermaid carcasses, he sabotages the film for the sake of the message. Never in our wildest dreams did we ever imagine a Stephen Chow film could be described as a buzz-kill, but here we are. Not recommended—especially not for children because of the slaughtered mermaids—Chow’s The Mermaid screens this Saturday (7/2) with a special Q&A scheduled with breakthrough star Jelly Lin at the Walter Reade, as part of this year’s NYAFF.

Sundance ’16: The Lure

Silver is a mermaid, not so very different from Disney’s Ariel. She likes to sing songs with her sister Golden and frolic in the sea. She will also be tempted to permanently adopt human form when she falls in love. That will be a big deal, because the mermaids typical eat men, after ensnaring them with their siren songs. Love is wet and painful in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure, which screens during the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Golden will regret not eating Mietek the bass player when she and Silver had the chance. Instead, they were rather quite taken with his playing, so they start singing with his family’s trio, Figs and Dates. Their sleazy impresario recognizes the novelty value of two naked singing mermaids, so he starts promoting them aggressively. Soon, they are the toast of Warsaw’s retro-1980s “dancings” scene, but there is trouble brewing.

The long stretches out of water are not good for the mermaids, particularly Silver, who has sworn off human flesh in deference to Mietek (but Golden, not so much). Despite her obvious torch-carrying, Mietek remains oblivious to her ardor—perhaps even willfully so. However, this holds some pretty heavy implications for mermaids.

Isn’t it great to have a splashy new water-based musical? It is like Ethel Merman swims and sings again. The Lure is strangely impressive when judged solely on movie musical terms, but what really makes the film distinctive is the way Smoczyńska and screenwriter Robert Bolesto update and deepen the mermaid mythos for a generation of urban fantasy readers and dancings scenesters.

Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska sell it perfectly as the relatively innocent Silver and the vampy Golden. Yet, Kinga Preis nearly out-divas Olszanska as the vocalist-mother of Figs and Dates. It all has a suitably eccentric look of indefinable vintage thanks to the work of production designer Joanna Macha and her team.

The Lure is sort of like love itself. It can be dark and sinister, but you miss it when its over. This is a wonderfully weird fairy tale that could be considered the flip side of Károly Ujj Mészáros’s warm and humanistic Liza, the Fox-Fairy. Highly recommended for mature genre and musical fans, The Lure screens again tomorrow (1/24), Tuesday (1/26), Thursday (1/28), and Saturday (1/30) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance.