Main cast: Eoin Macken (Ken), Anna Skelern (Rachel), Anthony Jabre (Marco), and Teresa Srbova (Silka)
Director: Andrew Hull
Firstly, a big thank you to Andrew Hull for directing Eoin Macken to remain shirtless and in those low-hanging shorts for almost the entire film, and thank you Eion Macken for obliging. If you like looking at completely hairless well-toned male physique (with a side-view glimpse of bum in one scene), Siren won’t disappoint in the male eye candy department. Anthony Jabre is a little more hirsute and natural-looking with a physique that is on the fit side without looking like it’d be uncomfortable or even painful to even touch those abs, but he keeps his shirt on too often. If you like ladies, this is your lucky day because… skinny-dipping girl-on-girl!
Siren looks like and aims to be one of those movies featuring mixed European cast members in a typical “beach, jealousy, danger” kind of affair. The plot, as usual, is merely an excuse to throw these people together in an isolated setting.
Ken and Rachel are a couple and they are looking forward to taking his boss’s yacht to a lovely island around Tunisia, where they’d then stay at his boss’s place. Something about a bonus for his performance at work, I believe. Right from the start, it’s pretty obvious that things are not perfect in paradise: she seems to want a more permanent kind of relationship, while he doesn’t appear to be interested in settling down anytime soon. Naturally, it makes sense for them to invite Marco, Rachel’s old friend who very clearly has a crush on her.
While Ken and Rachel head off to have sex, letting Marco steer the yacht in the meantime, Marco spots someone from a nearby island signaling for help. He decides to go to the rescue, but oops, to the point that he very nearly damages the yacht by heading too close to the shore. Worse, the guy he wants to help starts ranting and raving before firing off a gun and damaging the yacht. And then the man dies, apparently from internal bleeding of some sort.
The yacht damaged, the three are now forced to remain on the island as they figure out what to do. Ken, who is shown to be quite the ass by this point, has this amazing idea of burying the dead guy instead of alerting the authorities. They don’t want to be implicated in the death of that fellow, after all! Things get more lively when they find Silka, a beautiful creature who claims to have no memory of what happened to her. The men immediately take a shine to her, but Silka has eyes only for Rachel. That’s complicated, but it’s soon apparent that Silka is not what she seems to be. You can probably guess, from the title of this movie, that she’s an actual siren, one of those creatures whose song lures men to their deaths.
While Siren is marketed as a horror flick, it is more of a supernatural thriller thing. There is very little scare or gore here, just scenes of beautiful people roaming around in various states of half-dress until the inevitable denouement. The thing here is that the movie, for what it is, delivers very little actual pay-off. This movie wants to be a sexy thriller, so it builds up all kinds of sexually-charged tension, but there is little served up in terms of actual erotic moments. The movie suggests heavily that there would be really dire things to happen to the men, but what actually happens is anticlimactic. It also doesn’t help that Anna Skelern is the only cast member here that has more than one facial expression. Teresa Srbova is stuck in a thankless role where all she has to do is to look sexy, while Eoin Macken utters his lines like he is reading them off a teleprompter, and Anthony Jabre is just sort of there.
At the end of the day, “anticlimactic” describes this movie perfectly. Wants to be sexy, but no real sexy; wants to be a thriller, but no real thrills. Still, Siren is very nice to look at, so maybe it’s worth a watch if you have nothing else to do and doesn’t mind fast-forwarding things.
