This is a movie that sells itself.  Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska‘s musical is about flesh-eating mermaids working in a sleazy cabaret/strip club in 1980s Poland. That deranged mash-up of a premise provokes just as varied of a series of responses: thrilling, unsettling, sexy, repulsive, funny, and despairing.  With a kind of magical realism/urban fantasy/rock opera aesthetic, the director plays with feminine fears and desires in the face of a timidly repressive patriarchal society.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Kaneto Shindō’s The Naked Island (1960).