Film Corner: Siren

Who is ready for some Amazon Prime movie live tweeting? Because I watched KILLER MERMAID, Amazon would like me to know about SIREN: "Leigh has a unique power: every man who encounters her sees his ultimate fantasy and falls uncontrollably in love with her."

I don't really think that's a unique power; cis guys project on me all the damn time.

A male narrator with a voice like gritty gold tells us that there's a special girl everyone loves and she's hiding in the woods and we need to find her. Can we not just leave her alone? A lady in a house with cameras on it takes a shower, starts a barrel fire, and does something with a needle that might be drugs? She's the alonest alone woman in the world.

Children congregate outside her gate and dare each other to go on her property. One does. Haunting female song and staticy televisions turn on as he approaches the house. Instead of a woman, this boy-kid sees a beautiful girl-kid. She calls him "kid" and begs him to go home to his parents. His heart beats faster because love, I think?

(It's, uh, interesting that this boy child with brown eyes and brown hair and tan skin sees a pale blonde white girl as his ultimate fantasy. Do what you will with uhh that.) He runs off at her insistence that he leave and she yells after him "It wasn't your fault! Remember that!"

A man with a suit walks onto the property and sees a pretty woman with brown eyes and brown hair. The man stammers that he's looking for a girl who has had "quite an effect on my boy". Then he confesses that she's the loveliest woman he's ever seen. She looks miserable. This is not a happy siren, and I've never felt such immediate kinship with a character.

I do like that we all read the description and said " THAT'S A CURSE NOT A POWER" and so far the movie is like "yuuuup". How nice! OH SHIT. [TW: Violence] Suit asks her to run away with him, and when she refuses he backhands her and scolds her for "making me do that". Then he violently kisses her and she has to taser him. This poor woman.

I have a WIP on this subject, I'm agog at how much this resonates with me/others. It's almost like my little "joke" at the start of this about cis men projecting their fantasies on women is a Thing!! I thought this was gonna be a monster movie, not a CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON MY DATING LIFE. Cops show up and drag the guy away from where he's been dumped on the outside of her property gate. Good fences make good neighbors.

A Drifter wanders onto her property and she's shocked when he doesn't instantly fall in love with her. Instead, he passes out from an apparent pre-existing condition. He's hypoglycemic! She asks him how she looks and he says ".....nice?" She's relieved and shocked.

She begs him to stay and fix her electric fence and security cameras since he's an electrician and she is not. He's reluctant, but he's got nowhere else to stay. She locks him into her guest house, I presume because she's still afraid he might be drawn to her while she sleeps. This poor girl. She wants to be friends so badly, but she's also terrified of him. A bird suicides into her window, possibly because it loves her? It's unclear.

Two governmenty men visit Suit, who claims he remembers nothing and feels fine. I haven't seen another woman in this movie; you'd think if the government is keeping tabs on her, they'd use straight women. Assuming it doesn't work on them. Maybe it does, I don't know.

Oh god, she's watching home movies of her family visiting her while she lives behind a glass wall, MY HEART. Governmenty guys call Leigh on the phone and thank her for her service to "Circe" (a government branch). They demand she come in more than once a month because they want to increase how often they extract...something from her. (Blood? Siren juice? I don't know.) Leigh is upset and hangs up on him and cries.

She does something with a needle and puts a milky fluid in a test tube and then an envelope. Carefully, scared, she walks down to the mailbox whilst completely covered in robes. She drops off the mail and picks up several vases of flowers. Upstairs, Drifter finds her room while looking for Leigh and is weirded the fuck out to find eight million impassioned love letters and postcards addressed to Leigh by different men. (She made a collage out of the postcards.)

On the other side of town, Suit stares pensively out the window and doesn't hear his wife when she talks to him. Interestingly, Suit's wife looks faintly reminiscent of the blonde girl that Kid saw, and nothing at all like the dark-haired girl that Suit saw. Since this movie has been surprisingly thoughtful, I wonder if that's on purpose: Kid saw someone who reminded him of the mother he loves, and Suit saw someone who represented an escape from the wife he doesn't love.

I think Leigh is keeping the postcards because they have pictures of places she wants to travel to, but can't.

Suit can't maintain an erection with his wife, and tells her he's in love with someone else. This feels like that whole story about that guy thinking he's dating Natalie Portman, my god. There's a whole video about her parents leaving her to go leave a fake trail so Circe can't find her, and Leigh tells the television that they found her but she met someone.

She's feeding Drifter uncooked ground beef that has spoiled, I think maybe because she's afraid he'll leave and she's trying to make him sick so he'll stay? He's been established as not having a good sense of smell (or possibly not having one at all) so he can't tell the meat is bad. I'm sad. Oh! Oh, no, it was a test of his sense of smell! She stopped him before he took a bite and asked him straight out if the beef smelled off to him. He said he doesn't have a sense of smell. She took the beef away rather than let him eat it. Oh!! That's why he's immune to her!

(I thought Circe was the government but they might be just a really aggressive perfume company. It's unclear.) OH FUCK. Suit drives up while she's getting the mail and tells her he left his wife and they can be together now.

Oh oh no oh no oh no oh no. Hang on, I have to take a quick break and breathe.

Ok. [TW: Violence] Suit shoves Leigh to the ground and tries to kiss her. She smacks him upside the head with a flower vase. He hits her. She pushes him off her property and turns the electric fence on. Meanwhile, Drifter saw most of this on one of the security cameras and is currently running to help her, but she took care of it herself. Still a nice gesture from him.

Drifter is angry at Suit and Leigh yells IT'S NOT HIS FAULT and, having seen the postcards and aware that *something* weird is going on, Drifter asks what she means. "[Like you,] I also have a condition," she says, exhausted. Oh god, she keeps the "trophies" to remind herself why she can never leave this house.

"You have a gift," Drifter says, stunned.

"Not the word I would use," she says in the MOST EXHAUSTED VOICE EVER.

How have I never heard of this movie before?? This is amazing, I'm just.

Circe is a perfume company and they put a drop of her in their perfume bottles, "making everyone who wears it slightly more attractive." It's how she pays the bills; she can't work any other way. "Until the alarm and monitors are fixed, I am not safe." (Prior to the movie, there was a storm and some trees knocked out several electrical lines in town and smashed up a power box on her property.)

Oh gosh, she's so shy of him and he's so gentle and I'm just. I'm have a FEELS. There is GENTLE living and working and talking and it's like watching two baby deer play. GOOD AND WHOLESOME. I'm so terrified he's going to betray her somehow, I'm scared, y'all. Are we allowed a nice sweet romance that isn't tragic?

He...He found a gun in her house, checked it, and put it back. Ok. Ok. Good. Do not play with the gun, baby. Why...is he searching her house? Maybe he's just nosy? Please don't break my heart, Drifter. Oh, he found her money stash. He put it back! He hesitated, but he put it back and walked away from the money stash.

OH NO. Guy wants to go into town, and wants to take her with him. She insists that she can't, so he promises he'll be back later. As he walks down city streets, every man's head turns and their hearts beat faster. OH NO, THE PERFUME PEOPLE KNOW HIM. Circe is blackmailing him. They want her necklace so they can "go in" and get her. I don't know what her necklace does, but I'm UPSET.

Back at the house, Leigh finds his gun in his things. She unloads it for safety. Good girl.

Suit's Wife warns Guy that he should move on because the "witch" is going down. "You can't ruin people's lives and not expect feedback." So now we know why the cops were so chill about collecting Suit; it really DOES happen regularly and everyone in town knows about it. Fascinating. (You could even connect that to Suit being violent so quickly with her; if everyone in town hates and fears her, that could've carried over into his obsession. Not that entitled violence really needs an "explanation", but still.)

Suit's Wife is also homophobic, in case you needed another reason to hate her. Kid is still languishing for Leigh and Mom is afraid she "turned him gay" because he reads Shakespeare now. HOLY SHIT, she just slapped Kid across the face, so both parents are violent, that's great. Poor kid.

Meanwhile, Guy gets surrounded by guys whose hearts are doing the movie's "affected by pheremones" heartbeat noise, but they beat the crap out of Guy rather than trying to kiss him, so I don't know. OH, sorry, Guy beat the crap out of THEM. They tried it, he finished it. Army backgrounds are so useful in movies.

Guy: "Why'd you attack me?"

Dude: "I don't know."

I feel like these pheromones deserve study by someone who isn't an Evil Corporation. Leigh explains that she did ask him to shower before he left. "The smell reminded them of me. It was a tease, it made them hate you." Oh. So literally nobody "loves" her. It's just a world of men who feel entitled to her and are angry when they don't get their way. This poor woman.

Oh god, her necklace is a suicide device in case of capture. She knows Circe wants to capture her and get more of her essence in order to sell it as a weapon to the government. She won't allow that to happen. They used to experiment on her when she was a teenager. She doesn't feel like she has it bad enough, objectively speaking, to mope. I'm sobbing my eyes out.

Guy has patched her security cameras into free feeds around the world, and it's SO SWEET but I'm terrified this is part of an upcoming betrayal.

All she has to do is dip her hand in water for fish to swim up and be netted.

I'm so afraid he's going to use sex to get her necklace off, because I've seen the SAINT with Val Kilmer, lolsob. Sweet sex happens, then they wake up to the proximity alarm. Guy goes down to the fence. Suit's Wife demands to know if Suit is on the property.

Oh shit. [TW: Suicide] Suit hangs himself in front of the cameras in an attempt to hurt Leigh. Guy cuts the body down and hides it so she won't. THEN HE CUT THE POWER. THAT'S NOT GOOD. He's leaving in Suit's truck, no no no no no no no. No. Wait! He just HID the truck. Oh thank god. My heart can't.

OH. HE'S WARNING HER.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING.

NO NO NO NO

Oh oh oh oh oh oh!

I LOVE HIM. I WOULD DIE FOR HIM.

Ok, I very strongly urge you to NOT READ THIS and just watch the movie yourself, but:

[Spoilers]

Guy asked Leigh to leave with him because Circe is coming. She refuses, not trusting him, but he's prepared for this eventuality and lightly drugged her. He goes out to get the truck and is surprised by Suit's Wife, who stabs him. She's here to kill Leigh, but Leigh wakes up and shoots her in self-defense.

Guy is too wounded to help Leigh leave and Circe is coming in. He asks her to trust him. They put her necklace on Wife's body SINCE NOBODY KNOWS WHAT LEIGH LOOKS LIKE and Guy says he was forced to kill "Leigh" after she stabbed him. They get Guy medical attention (hooray for realistic stab wounds) and they think Leigh is dead so they'll stop pursuing her.

Guy leaves the hospital and meets up with Leigh driving Suit's truck.

[/Spoilers]

That movie was AMAZING, I'm goddamn furious it doesn't have 10 whole stars on IMDB.

They don't say, but it's implied they're gonna go live on a nice deserted island forever, idk, I don't care, I got my happy ending. If you want a handwave: At the hospital, men see Leigh with different faces, but they don't mob her. I would suggest that the people in town were extra-quickly affected by her because of the stories surrounding the "town witch" and also maybe there was a buildup of her scent.

Oh gosh, I just realized that the opening narration is the Circe guy hiring Guy. What a wonderfully subtle touch. I'm just so used to Unexplained Narrators that I didn't expect that at all. I don't know how to cope with the fact that the last Amazon Prime movie was GOOD.

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I can't stop thinking about this movie. It struck me today that the young boy's "love" manifests as gentle and soft (he's writing poems and reading Shakespeare) and it's the older men's "love" that manifests as violent and entitled. STRONGLY IMPLYING that rape culture is learned, and not an innately "male" behavior!! I would seriously make this movie an extra credit viewing for, like, a gender studies course.

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@johnhorner.
Movie Guy: I'm working on a movie and I've got a great title for it, wanna hear?
Movie Guy's Friend: OK
Movie Guy: (makes swooping hand gesture) "Siren!"