"Lamb" -- Movie Review

 

This week, I streamed a screening from A24 of the new horror mystery, “Lamb”, starring Noomi Rapace. 

Synopsis

When childless farmers adopt a newborn lamb and raise it as a human child, what price must they pay for defying nature?

Story

Maria and her husband Ingvar (Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason) own a farm in a remote, mountainous region of rural Iceland.  Without children, they spend their time and attention caring for their flock of sheep.  Except for the occasional roar of their tractor or the bleating of the sheep, it’s incredibly quiet there.  No deliveries, no visitors, nothing.  Yet the couple seem quite content with their life – at least ostensibly.  The weather there is frequently chilly and damp and gray, it can tend to be downright depressing.  These are people of strong spirit, so there are no complaints. 

Occasionally, Maria must play the role of midwife when one of the sheep is pregnant.  One day during a peculiarly difficult birthing process, an unexpected event occurs:  the baby that is born has both human and sheep body parts.  It has the head of a lamb but the rest of the body is that of a baby human in form.  Both Maria and Ingvar are at a loss because they’ve never seen anything like this before.  Maria decides to bring the newborn into their house and proceeds to bottle feed the baby.  After a while of caring for it, they begin to bond.  Ingvar doesn’t interfere – instead, he buys into his wife’s fantasy and also takes on the role of father to this lamb – a girl they name Ada.

Eventually, they are paid a visit by Ingvar’s brother, Petur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) under some rather suspicious circumstances.  Petur is nothing less than shocked to find his brother and sister-in-law caring for Ada as if it was a normal situation.  He tries to snap them out of whatever spell they are in, but they shut him down completely.  Soon, Petur decides to play along, if for no other reason than he needs a place to stay for a while.  Not long after, he manages to ruin the arrangement when he tries to come on to Maria; realizing he’s overstayed his welcome, she drops him off where he can catch a bus into town, giving him some money.  But upon her return, how will Maria deal with the horrifying discovery at the farm?

Review

If you think that a movie about a pair of Icelandic shepherds wouldn’t be appropriate Halloween fare, guess again.  “Lamb” is an unusually spooky film with plenty of unexpected twists and turns.  The theme of “Lamb” appears to be something along the lines of, “if you mess with nature then ultimately, nature will get its revenge on you”.  “Lamb” is an unusual motion picture in many ways but also because it feels like it’s multi-genre – science fiction, horror and folklore all wrapped up into a single story.  For that alone, it deserves kudos for the unique blending of genres – something that’s rarely seen because it’s difficult to pull off, especially when you consider that this is a first-time feature film director.

One thing that’s noticeably problematic about “Lamb” is the fact that it is excruciatingly slowly paced.  This is of particular issue in the beginning because the movie takes its own sweet time getting started and you begin to wonder where it’s going or even if you’re watching a documentary about shepherds.  One the plus side, doing this is very filmic in the sense that it is all visual and there is precious little in the way of dialog.  That said, the setup isn’t terribly foreboding; there’s nothing to indicate that this rustic setting will turn deadly or that these farmers are bad people who do something worth being punished. 

The mountainous Icelandic countryside is beautiful and shot with both admiration and respect.  Depending on how you feel about such things, you may or may not be envious of where the couple lives – after all, there’s so much in the way of empty land around them they have no neighbors.  You get the sense that a trip into town to shop for some essentials would be a major excursion that they would not make often because it would be so time consuming.  Perhaps in that regard, their isolation is part of their undoing; it takes the brother-in-law’s visit to shock them back into reality and even then, their desperation for a child overrides that concern.