A work whose hybrid form is rooted in a hybrid protagonist — a human who was once a merwoman, but now walks the earth — Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann’s feature debut “Sirens Call” is politically and artistically radical. Like its subject, the part-fiction, part-documentary feature defies easy categorization, living somewhere in the overlap between science fiction, American road-trip travelogue and “Koyaanisqatsi” by way of folklore.
The film yields aesthetic and narrative rug-pulls that are at once completely surprising and yet make perfect sense when their pieces fall into place, gently revealing shattering truths viewers might feel they’ve always known, deep in their bones. This cinematic sleight of hand creates a dynamic approach to human bodies in the realm of disability and gender dysphoria — first as fantasy metaphor, then as direct political confrontation. To even explain its premise requires leg work, but not a single moment of its two-hour runtime feels amiss.
Shot in the present on 16mm, the movie’s hazy texture turns it into a throwback to decades past, dislodging it from time. The harsh neon colors of its introduction, set in a strange laboratory, place it alongside gaudy genre B movies, but its voiceover — of the directors interviewing a middle-aged woman, Una (Gina Rønning) — roots it in documentary conventions. This clash defines much of the film’s first half, in which Una reveals she’s a former mermaid who has returned to an unfamiliar planet, an observational point-of-view to which “Sirens Call” becomes unapologetically tethered. As Una travels across America, and as news stories of encroaching right-wing oppression (especially against transgender people) fill the radio space, “Sirens Call” becomes a portrait of modern America, and of the struggle to live authentically.
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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. These refractions filter down into haunting moments, when this self-proclaimed water being (who seems uncomfortable with having legs) begins donning various wigs as she observes aquariums and performance spaces where women dress up as mermaids and perform for paying crowds.
At every turn, she encounters a commercialized simulacrum of her former identity. 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.
In her own search for authenticity, Una begins listening to self-help recordings advising her on how to form friendships and to function in everyday society. Upon moving to smaller towns, she tries out these methods of communication on various men she meets in nondescript parking lots and, eventually, on a nonbinary Tarot card reader named Moth (Moth Rønning-Bötel), in whose own outsidership Una finds understanding and reflection. As this languid narrative unfolds, it lays the gravel for the movie’s second half in unexpected ways that feel revelatory in retrospect.
At one point, the film undergoes distinct transitions, replacing its naturalistic form with kaleidoscopic vistas, while also swapping its dramatic blocking for documentary-style talking heads, involving an entirely new set of subjects. Either way, this complete inversion keeps two contrasting approaches to reality — the constructed and the “real” — in close proximity, as it interviews real-life subjects who are part of a merfolk community in Portland. 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.
What might’ve seemed pithy or condescending in another movie becomes downright gorgeous, as each interviewee is bathed in monochromatic light, and shines like a precious jewel. (One is even filmed in motion, à la “Serpentine Dance.”) There’s a distinct sense of history to “Sirens Call” that feels both purposeful and transformative, and even its more obscure details become rich and multifaceted when the movie’s seemingly dueling narratives — its talking heads and sci-fi walkabout — cross-pollinate in unexpectedly soulful ways, revealing the touching realities that inspired the movie’s fiction.
No one in the documentary portion comes right out and says it, but from the moment they begin explaining their proclivities for dressing up as merpeople, their lifestyles come across as entirely necessary to each of them, as vital as breathing. The community at the movie’s center is made up of politically active individuals from a vast range of experience, so much of its footage (shot in 2020) concerns protests against police brutality, and other conversations on acceptance. However, words are not the political driving force in “Sirens Call.” Rather, they exist to punctuate the radical politics of its imagery, which seeks to unveil unique points of view through alluring fusions of dramatic form. There’s nothing quite like it.
