A childless couple living in isolation on an Icelandic farm receive a most unusual gift from mother nature and come to pay a terrible price in Lamb, a strikingly sure-handed debut from director Valdimar Jóhannsson that won the Un Certain Regard Prize of Originality at Cannes last month before bowing at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Lamb stars Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason as Maria and Ingvar, a childless couple who tirelessly work in tandem on their rural farmland: tilling the soil, planting crops, and raising a large flock of sheep, assisting in the birth of newborns.
But one of those newborns… well, it’s something else. This is foreshadowed in an opening sequence set on Christmas Eve, when a mysterious, foreboding presence, identified through an Evil Dead-like camera POV, makes its way across the farmland and into the barn, where it, uh, has its way with one of the sheep.
Some time later there’s a strange newborn lamb, and we might imagine a satanic farm animal akin to the black goat in The Witch, a film which Lamb often recalls in its ominous tone. But for the first half of the movie, the exact nature of that newborn is left to our imagination. Instead, we watch as Maria and Ingvar react to the newborn with… joy? That doesn’t seem right.
“This is happiness,” Ingvar tells his brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) after he arrives on the farm and greets Ada, the name given to the young lamb by Maria and Ingvar, with the same trepidation as the audience. By now, the secret behind Ada is out, and we know why Lamb waited 45 minutes to tell us.
Warning: avoid the A24 trailer for the film, which lets the cat out of the bag and spoils the first half of the film. The secret of Lamb will probably be spoiled for most future audiences in any event, but it was one of the great joys of seeing it at this year’s KVIFF, and drew some wild reactions from the audience.
The tonal shift in Lamb can be jarring, but kudos to director Jóhannsson for maintaining that foreboding atmosphere through the duration of the movie: there are lighthearted moments here and there, but we never forget that there’s an ominous threat lurking behind every corner.
Lamb is essentially an eerie horror film like The Witch crossed with something along the lines of Paddington, and if that sounds weird and wild, well, the film certainly delivers on that promise. This is disturbing and funny and creepy and heartfelt all at the same time, and it’s a credit to the sure-handed production that it manages to pull it all off.
It’s no surprise that the always-excellent Rapace gives an empathetic performance as Lamb’s mother, tender but grounded and surprisingly genuine. But her male co-stars are just as good, and manage to develop their own heartfelt relationship with the titular creature. There’s a moment of levity between the three leads just before the film’s climax, when Maria puts on a VHS tape of a young Pétur, that brings a poignancy to the events that soon follow.
The ambiguous final moments of Lamb don’t quite strike the same tonal chords of the film that precede it, which are perfectly balanced between offbeat comedy and impending-doom horror; when the vague threat is given physical form, the movie loses its dark portent. But there’s no denying the care and attention to detail that went into crafting this oddball gem, and the result is a rare film that feels unlike anything we have seen before it.
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