Lamb will debut in North American theaters on Oct. 8.
The premise of Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb invites utmost intrigue: in rural Iceland, a childless farming couple adopts a newborn baby lamb with a strange anatomy. They name her Ada and they raise her as their own, as if she were a fully human child. Jóhannsson, through the way he captures bewildered reactions to this unconventional family, recognizes the inherent ridiculousness of his story — which he co-wrote with novelist and lyricist Sjón — but he takes a straight-faced, tender approach to his characters, while also framing them within a phantasmagorical atmosphere. In the process, he crafts an uncanny modern folktale that’s as thoughtfully considered as it is wildly absurd.
The first thing that stands out about Lamb is the eerie way Jóhannsson and cinematographer Eli Arenson move the camera through space. Its relationship to the Icelandic mountainside feels immediately off-kilter, when the film establishes the farm belonging to Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason). Fog often envelopes their cozy home, their crowded barn, and their herds of grazing sheep, making it hard to tell exactly how near or far a given subject is, even as they approach the foreground. Even clear, daylight shots of Maria and Ingvar traversing this terrain can’t help but feel like oddities; the familiar mountains behind them are so enormous that even as the camera moves alongside them, the composition of the background rarely changes. It’s like tracking the sun or the moon from a moving car, and it turns even simple medium shots of people walking through nature into something unreal.
This relationship between the natural and the unnatural constantly takes center stage. What’s on-screen in a given moment ought to feel comfortable and harmonious; Maria and Ingvar’s interactions with their sheep (and the many lambs they help birth) are shot practically, and both Rapace and Gudnason seem completely at ease while handling these messy miracles. However, something intangible lingers in the ether. By night, harsh, rumbling noises draw the animals’ attention — not only the sheep, but Maria and Ingvar’s pet cat and dog as well. By day, the couple goes through the motions of their daily routine, but their interactions about their work feel stilted and weighed down. Nothing is overtly wrong with them, as far as we can tell, yet something feels amiss.
The film eventually fills in both these gaps — what exactly is lurking in the night, and what troubles Maria and Ingvar — but in the meantime, it lets both these questions linger, especially when one of their ewes gives birth to a peculiar lamb, with whom the couple is immediately enamored. A significant amount of time goes by before we’re able to get a full look at the child’s anatomy, leading to more looming questions about why exactly Maria and Ingvar are so quickly taken (the lamb is initially wrapped up in blankets, with only its head peeking out). However, the camera often ascribes human traits to the child, and a human perspective, even when her body is obscured. It peeks over her shoulder, and it captures hints of human-like movements, out of focus and in the corner of the frame, as if the film were actively working to transform her from an animal to a fully fledged human being, in our hearts foremost, before presenting the idea to our eyes.
We do eventually get a good look at Ada, though at first, instead of offering an explanation for what she is — visually, or otherwise — the film simply presents us with Maria and Ingvar’s reactions to her unconventional birth. It allows the sudden, complicated spark of brightness on their faces, and their unspoken mutual understanding, to tell one half of their story. An empty crib they bring out of storage hints at the other half, and while the film takes its time before tipping its hand, it offers plenty such emotional clues as to the melancholy place Ada occupies in the couple’s lives. Their child’s shape is less important than the shape of the hole they’re trying to fill.
Immediately and without question — and to the chagrin of Ada’s birth mother, a particularly persistent ewe — this new nuclear family falls into a comfortable rhythm, one interrupted only by the sudden arrival of Ingvar’s vagabond brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), a former rockstar. Pétur isn’t quite as comfortable with his strange new niece, but like Maria and Ingvar, the film is committed to its gimmick to the point of theatrical absurdism, with Rapace and Gudnason throwing themselves headfirst into the role of dedicated parents. Their love for Ada is real, and by the time she begins moving around, like a human child in human clothes and with distinctly human motions, that love becomes unquestionable, both because of their glowing adoration for her, and because of the lengths they’re willing to go to in order to protect her.
The film is committed to its gimmick to the point of theatrical absurdism.
Pétur is the only other human character in the film, and its approach to stepping outside the couple’s perspective is hilariously tongue-in-cheek. In addition to Pétur, the couple’s dog and cat often become the subjects of curious reaction shots, as if the events were puzzling to the animals as well. They, too, seem aware that the family’s harmony is something unnatural, or supernatural, but Maria and Ingvar are too caught up in their blissful (and perhaps intentional) ignorance to recognize their judgement, the way the viewer readily does. But while we’re initially granted an outsider’s view into the family, their domestic bliss eventually becomes alluring — enough that when it’s finally threatened by mysterious forces, the idea of Ada being a natural part of Maria and Ingvar’s lives no longer feels quite so unusual.
