Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy (director)
(studio)
15 (certificate)
83 (length)
22 July 2019 (released)
21 July 2019
Mermaids are on something of wave (no pun as some of these appear to be lake bound) at the moment with Sirens on TV and the film The Siren (The Rusalka) getting good reviews.
Whether this Russian take on the myth Mermaid: The Lake of the Dead has come out purely by chance now is neither here nor there as it’s not a great entry into this aquatic sub-genre.
Opening with a brief run through of the legend we are then taken to swimming pool where Marina (?) (Viktoriya Agalakova) is struggling to keep her head above water as she learning to swim. No such problems for her fiancé Roma (Efim Petrunin) who’s a pretty damn good swimmer.
Which is just as wall as his choice of venue for his stag party is his Father’s old house by a lake that’s shrouded in mystery due to an accident many years ago, and dust as its barely been used. Roma isn’t quite so taken by the strippers wandering off onto the jetty where he has an encounter that changes the course of the film in several ways.
Director Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy does a good job up to here setting the scene with some beautiful shots and a good build-up of atmosphere around the house. Roma is now under some sort of possession and Marina is getting suspicious. Intro Olga (Sesil Plezhe) who starts to work things out and take the story forward into fairly predictable areas of legend, death, ghosts and revenge.
The story fumbles forward with revelations and some not bad set pieces however if you have your wits about you, you’ll work out what is going to happen and who will do what quite quickly. Not sure that is entirely by design but it does tend to make things tedious as your predictions come true. That could be the result of many years of watching films, also that the story just doesn’t have enough vigour to hold the attention.
