The following article contains spoilers for Lamb.
By any account, Lamb is an odd film, one that really gets going after director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s first chapter lures viewers to enjoy the beautiful landscapes rural Iceland has to offer while their intrigue grows towards an ending that, albeit not delivering the type of thrills the rest of the movie flirts with, still pays off its cold and eerie setting.
Lamb was first screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, under the Un Certain Regard, which is usually comprised of movies that don’t play by the rules or stick with easy to digest plots and storytelling standards. Suffice to say, Lamb checks all the boxes in that department, and that’s probably why Lamb is being moved in the United States by A24, the indie studio behind Uncut Gems and 2016's Moonlight and also the distributor for the likes of The Disaster Artist, and Lady Bird.
Lamb stars the brilliant Noomi Rapace as Maria (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Prometheus), Hilmir Snaer Gudnason as her husband Ingvar, and Björn Hlynur Haraldsson as her brother-in-law Pétur, all of whom are great in their respective roles, despite the film lacking too much dialogue. In all truth, Lamb shines the most due to the subtlety that it uses to get inside the viewer’s head, meaning it’s probably best enjoyed without any spoilers (including the trailer) and this should be considered the final spoiler warning for this review, alongside the recommendation to at least hang on until Chapter 1 ends.
Maria and Ingvar are a childless couple who live on a farm, and much like Mary from the nursery rhyme, Maria also has a little lamb. After an opening scene fitting for a horror movie, Lamb shows off the daily life of the couple on their sheep farm, where they attend to their animals, all while giving off serious vibes that there’s something wrong in their lives, they seem happy and yet it’s obvious that they’re not for some reason.
However, that doesn’t last too long as the movie changes dramatically one day when the two are caught off guard and a very special offspring from one of their sheep. Again, subtlety is the name of the game so the audience’s imagination has to complete the image Maria and Ingvar see, but it’s precisely this way of making people wonder “is it there? is it not there?” that should perhaps earn the director more praise.
It’s impossible to talk about the rest of the film without spoiling its first big reveal, but the fact of the matter is that Ada, the little lamb the couple brings into their home, is a half human-half sheep baby, and when the two adopt her as a child of their own it becomes obvious what they’ve been missing and what was the source for the sorrowful mood in their early conversations. Though most viewers will quickly suspect this, the moment when it’s confirmed comes both gradually, and then suddenly as Hemingway would say, regardless of almost 40 minutes maybe being a tad too long.
From there on Lamb shifts gear into a family life type of film, but one that’s constantly being hunted by whatever is watching Ada and her new foster parents, and it’s here where Jóhannsson’s camera work helps transmit the notion that something very bad is about to happen. It bears saying that Lamb is very much not a horror movie with jump scares, it’s more much of a mystery fantasy thriller that, as Jóhannsson would say, borrows its mythology from traditional Nordic folk tales and many other art forms, plus the writing of Icelandic poet Sjón.
The movie’s entire setting greatly complements the story Jóhannsson is trying to tell and there’s a lot of beauty to find in the many landscape shots (think Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice) that cut in between its exposition scenes. Besides the farm, there are very few outside elements in Maria and Ingvar’s life, that is until Pétur shows up to point out what one’s been thinking this entire time, that Ada is simply not from this world.
Somehow, Pétur is taken by Ada’s very literal sheep-eye stare and he joins the couple in raising the mammal hybrid, though of course, she grows rapidly from being a newborn baby to a walking toddler. The process does not go unnoticed by the other sheep that live on the farm and those that roam around it, neither of which are too keen on this severe transgression of nature’s very laws, and Lamb’ssetting deserves credit for being so immersive it manages to even make sheep scary.
It’s worth imagining a world where Lamb is not an Icelandic indie film but something more mainstream, and in that reality maybe the movie’s genre-fitting ending probably takes up a better chunk of its runtime to turn into a proper horror film. Nevertheless, although that’s not what Lamb is, it should not deter anyone from enjoying its weirdness in all its glory because chapters two and three complete a story that is truly like no other.
Lamb