Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
This is an Australian movie about a conservative English minister (Hugh Grant) who travels to Australia in the 1930s with his wife to talk to a painter to convince him to withdraw one of his controversial paintings of nude women from an art exhibition. The movie's title refers to his painting of the Sirens who lure men to their deaths with their intoxicating song. The minister is shocked (but lured) by the painter's three beautiful models, who we see frequently posing nude for the painter, while his wife deals with her own repressed sexual urges. The painter refuses to withdraw the painting and tells the minister that after Christianity women have been blamed for all the evil in the world.
This is the Adam and Eve myth, of course, and that would not be complete without a snake, so a large brown Australian snake shows up a few times in random places with no other obvious connection to the plot - at a creek, crawling on to a porch, and crawling into a pond near a toy boat. The snake appearances are probably sybolic in ways that escape me.
A couple of the models bathing in a stream tease two other models that they should be careful of water snakes. Then we see a snake enter the water in the same place that one of the women enters later, but the two never encounter each other.
At the beginning of the movie we hear about other dangerous creatures - spiders under the toilet with big teeth, scorpions, centipedes, and repeated tales of deaths from sharks. We also see shots of a large spider, a wombat, a koala, and a large lizard. All of these things underscore the strangeness of the place to the newly-arrived English couple. But snakes appear repeatedly, culminating with a shot of the wife on a train reading a newspaper article about a snake running amok and biting six toddlers.
The large snake, or snakes, we see are some kind of Australian python, as far as I can tell.
