Cinematic Releases: Lamb (2021) - Reviewed

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Courtesy of A24

Hungarian master filmmaker Béla Tarr has been back in the world cinema spotlight again recently, firstly with the arrival of the new 4K restoration of his seven-hour epic film Sátántangó and for being attached as an executive producer to the Icelandic film debut of writer-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s uncanny valley fable Lamb.  Recently picked up and released wide by A24, the film co-written by upcoming The Northman writer Sjón is being sold as some kind of body horror hybrid spooker and while on some level it is, Jóhannsson’s first feature is mostly a curious if not eccentric fable about maternal instincts set out in the open mountainous terrain of Iceland.

Courtesy of A24
Consisting of only four characters total, this minimalist yet expansive-in-scope slow burner stars Noomi Rapace as Maria who with her husband Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) works on a farm caring for their flock of sheep.  One morning, the childless couple helping to birth their pregnant sheep discover something bizarre has happened: one of them has given birth to some sort of half-human/half-sheep crossbred creature.  Instead of being shocked or horrified by their new arrival, they decide to adopt and raise it as their own, naming the female sheep baby Ada even.  Their newfound idyllic utopia with Ada is tested however by the arrival of Invgar’s drifter brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) who is more than a little nonplussed by their new baby.

Courtesy of A24
Closer to eerie folk horror than the outright supernatural freakout being peddled in trailers, Lamb is an odd coexistence between cute and unsettling with particular emphasis placed on the isolation of the characters with nothing but mountains surrounding them on all sides.  Informed by such films as Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life or Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Lamb immerses you in the ordinary mountainous splendor of farm life captured beautifully in panoramic widescreen by cinematographer Eli Arenson.  So stunningly gorgeous is this film to look at you feel as though you’re in an ethereal place of magic where the rules of the modern world no longer apply. 

The soundtrack by Þórarinn Guðnason, compounded with the minimalist sound design of ambient winds, rain, mist, soft sounds of sheep and an ever-slight hint of something unknown, is an equally immersive soundscape that compliments the breathtaking visuals very well.  Performance wise, Lamb is a nice little character driven chamber piece of sorts which is largely told in the open outdoors but is chock full of tense insular scenes of Maria’s growing affections for Ada coming out in outbursts of anger.  The tensions between Rapace and brother Haraldsson are palpable with hints of a past life together now further complicated by the married couple’s new “gift”, with the lines differentiating animal from human blurred almost completely.

Courtesy of A24
Fans of A24 and folk horror will find much to digest here, touching on the glitteringly scenic slow burn thriller while also attempting to spark existential dialogue about the family unit in general.  Though it never really becomes the hair-raising freakout the trailer is selling, Lamb is truly an interesting exercise with a setting that is at once beautiful, otherworldly and a perfect setting for some unverified species of creature to propagate.  It is also rare in our current timeline to get a peculiar, albeit uncommercial cinematic oddity, from Iceland no less, and have it go into wide theatrical release.  Folk horror is making a comeback and we have the folks at A24 to thank for reseeding this particular cinematic bug in modern filmgoers.

--Andrew Kotwicki