A delicious mix of Christian, pagan, and Icelandic mythology topped with a familiar A24 glaze of unsettling stillness and visual vibrancy, “Lamb” offers challenges in equal proportion to its rewards. A layered text that unpacks itself like a Russian nesting doll of human folly, the film showcases minimalist subtlety that deploys its pieces with exacting precision. Intriguing, suspenseful, occasionally hilarious, and perpetually engaging, “Lamb” exists in a space unencumbered by genre and unconcerned with expectation.
Opening in the darkness of a blustery Icelandic Christmas evening, the camera follows an unseen menace stalking around the edges of a remote farm. Daybreak reveals that the property is owned and tended to by a middle-aged married couple, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gundason), whose lack of conversation and strained efforts to smile at each other fill in many of their backstory’s blanks. The pair work hard and seem to care for each other, yet Rapace and Gundason are doing double duty in these first 15 minutes or so, playing this life of theirs and the steady stream of work as little more than an aspirin for the silent, emotional cancer eating them alive.
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Ironically enough, they find literal salvation in their barn when one of their ewes gives birth to a lamb-human baby, a creature Maria and Ingvar resolve to raise as their own child. To say much more than this would spoil the fun of some of the movie’s best moments (and go beyond what’s already revealed in the trailer), but it should suffice to say that “Lamb” proceeds from here like a boulder rolling ever-faster down an increasingly steep hill. Teasing not just Christian symbolism and mythology but also Icelandic Huldufólk lore, the film manages to weave one couple’s story into a larger narrative about humanity’s place in the world.
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Thankfully there aren’t any tedious flashbacks or monologues to draw this out, and it’s a credit to director Valdimar Jóhannsson and the script he co-wrote with Sjón that all of this comes across as clearly as it does. Subtle visual clues early on hint at the source of Maria and Ingvar’s chronic grief, and it’s a detail that informs the emotional arc of both characters. Their work on the farm in direct communion with nature, and the way Jóhannsson frames his subjects against the impossible grandeur of the mountains and sky behind them, tell half the story, here, and pairs well with the narrative undercurrent of Ingvar and Maria fighting their own little battle against despair.
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Like Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem or even Jonathan and Martha Kent in Smallville, Ingvar and Maria believe they have found salvation with the arrival of Ada. Yet as the visual cues in “Lamb” keep hinting at, humans are just a speck in the vast, ancient, grinding machinery of this world, and fighting against forces no man or woman can hope to defeat, even just via the hope of deliverance, is a dangerous game. Whether it is the grief Maria and Ingvar are dodging, a past that resurfaces with the return of a long-lost brother, or just the elemental forces of nature that brook no compromises with human tenants: all bills eventually come due.
Björn Hlynur Haraldsson does good work as Pétur, Ingvar’s screw-up sibling who crashes at the farm for a time while he flirts with rock-bottom, yet “Lamb” is a classic two-hander throughout most of its 106 minutes, with Rapace and Gundason parrying emotional blows with what feels like a lifetime of implications. Again, it would have been easier for the film to shortcut some of their history with a slow pan onto an old newspaper article or with 30 seconds of an overheard phone conversation. Yet, the script trusts the actors to convey this eń route to the startling conclusion and that faith is rewarded.
Some might quibble with the absence of any conversation about taking Ada to town for tests and examination by a medical community that would be understandably floored by this once-in-an-epoch evolutionary development, but that’s a different movie. Unquestionably inspired by Icelandic folklore and a cultural tradition that instinctively yields to the will of nature, not to mention a smattering of Christian and Superman traditions, “Lamb” is a fable in the most traditional sense.
As such, it doesn’t live in a world concerned with blood draws and MRIs, and while a throwaway line dismissing this notion would have been nice (along with a better sense of time), concerns like this don’t rock the narrative boat all that much. The story of an Icelandic couple raising a lamb-baby? Sure. Yet if one goes along for the ride on this one, they’ll find a rich, complex stew of ideas that transcends body horror and gets to the heart of how people manage a balance (or don’t) with life, death, and the larger world: sheep-mutants and all.