Crew
Director – Svyatoslav Podgaevsky, Screenplay – Natalie Dubovaya, Ivan Kapitonov & Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy, Photography – Anton Zenkovich, Music – Maxim Koshevarov & Alexandr Mayev, Visual Effects Supervisor – Vladimir Lamzin, Visual Effects – Amalgama VFX, Makeup Design – Julia Tunik, Production Design – Alexandra Fatina. Production Company – Central Partnership/Kit Film Studio/STGCinema/QS Films/Cinema Fund Russia.
Cast
Viktoriya Agalakova (Marina), Efim Petrunin (Roma Kitaev), Sesil Plezhe (Olga Kitaeva), Nikita Elenev (Ilya), Sofya Shidlovskaya (Lisa Grigorieva/The Mermaid), Evgeniy Koryakovskiy (Coach Nikolayevich), Igor Khripunov (Father)
Plot
Roma Kitaev goes up to the family cabin with his teammates from the swim team for a bachelor party. During the midst of this, Roma goes for a swim in the lake and sees a figure. His teammates later find him unconscious on the shore. Returning home to his fiancée Marina, Ilya becomes increasingly ill. Roma’s sister Olga believes that Ilya has been affected by a mermaid creature, the spirit of Lisa Grigorieva, a young girl who drowned in the lake. Lisa seeks to claim souls and has affected their father and claimed their mother. Marina tries to find a means to stop the mermaid and save Ilya.
Russian genre cinema has been doing some extraordinary things in the late 2010s/2020s. During this period, we have had a number of works that venture into horror and dark fantasy where they stir a pot of mythology, folklore and history, or are mixes of sf and monster movie. These include the likes of The Blackout (2019), The Ninth (2019), Sputnik (2020), The Superdeep (2020), The Widow (2020) and The Ice Demon (2021). (See Russian Cinema).
Director Svyatoslav Podgaevsky has been prominent in this Russian fantastic revival, having had a hit with Queen of Spades (2016). He has gone onto make other horror films such as The Bride (2017), Baba Yaga, Terror of the Dark Forest (2020) and Dark Spell (2021), along with other works such as Block 18 (2014) and the tv series Kitchenblock (2021).
My frustration with The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead is that the only version of the film available is one that has been dubbed into English. My preference is always for watching a film in the language it was made with subtitles as that is the nearest approximation to the creator’s original vision – one need only think of the inept dubbing on 1970s martial arts films or Japanese monster movies. Not even scouring the darkest corners of bit torrent and the internet failed to turn a Russian copy. That said, I can’t complain about the dubbing as the job performed is quite a good one that closely approximates the actor’s lip movements – it failed to draw me out of the film with its artificiality in the way that most dubbing does.
The dubbing does lead to one issue – the film’s title The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead and its naming the creature as a Mermaid. The original Russian title Rusalka: Ozero Myortvykh (Rusalka: Lake of the Dead) identifies the creature as a Rusalka, which is a figure from Slavic folklore, often a woman that has drowned and waits around a body of water to seduce men and then drag them underwater with her long hair. It is not that we haven’t had English-language films about rusalkas – see Perry Blackshear’s The Siren (2019). However, this retitling serves to place The Mermaid squarely into the arena of dark mermaid films we have had since the 2000s – see the likes of She Creature (2001), Charlotte’s Song (2015), The Lure (2015) and Little Mermaid (2016) – when in fact, the creature present is less a mermaid than it is a Supernatural Retribution film about an avenging ghost spirit trapped in a pond.
Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy does okay. He plays a good many Reality and Illusion games on us throughout. There is also a great deal of watery imagery – from people taking showers, Efim Petrunin and his swimming team, closeups of taps going on/off or dripping, people making beverages – in just about every scene throughout. I thought The Mermaid was okay. The mood held me absorbed, although I reached the end of the film without feeling there were any standout moments.
Trailer here