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‘Sirens Call’ Review: A Radical Film Combining Merfolk Mythology and Political Documentary
Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann’s feature debut 'Siren's Call' walks a fine line between fiction and reality.
Through nighttime fragments of American cities — crowds of people in costumes, pyramids in Las Vegas, chain restaurants in New York, and ethnically-specific fast-food outlets like Taco Bell — Una’s alienation from the modern world takes center stage, as the culture surrounding her feels constructed entirely from facsimile. Even the movie — which sometimes involves Una being interviewed, but sometimes sees her speaking to a disembodied camera in traditionally dramatic scenes — rides a fine line between drama and reality, as it confronts the question of what staying true to oneself even means in a fluid, ever-changing world. From a distance, they might seem like LARPers and cosplayers, but the movie’s inside-out approach to reality (in which it dramatizes the mythological) opens the viewers to a greater empathy when these subjects begin spilling their hearts about their complex relationship to trauma, gender and sexuality, and their respective coping mechanisms.
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