Lamb
a24Since the early days of the company’s history, A24 has declared itself to be one of the most prolific and unique distributors when it comes to modern horror. While this identity has led to the discovery of modern masters of the genre like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, it has also led to some horrific miscalculations. Debuting at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Valdimar Jóhannsson's Lamb adds another inspired addition to this list of releases. Taking place on a farm in Iceland, the troubled couple of María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) are helping their sheep give birth when one produces an offspring unlike any other. While it contains the head of a lamb, the body is that of a human child. Maria and Ingvar immediately take it in as their own child almost with a silent agreement of what this means to the both of them following recent events within their relationship. Tensions rise as a mysterious entity begins to lurk outside and Ingvar's brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) visits the family.
If there is one thing to say about Lamb in a positive sense it would be how engrossing the film feels in its setting. Opening on a cold Christmas-eve blizzard and quickly transitioning to a stunning Icelandic spring, Lamb is undeniably an aesthetically beautiful film, almost capturing the environmental majesty found in projects like The Sound of Music. The vibrance of the endless green grass mixed with dense clouds and fogs surrounding the nearby mountains creates a beautiful isolation. Cinematographer Eli Arenson provides thoughtfully shot composition and framing that consistently goes back to the natural life on the farm. From the sheep together in the barn to a cat and dog roaming outside, the film continues to go back to animals to find its sources of tension and atmosphere which feel both raw and uncanny compared to what is normally provided.
The acting is also rather undeniable. While both Hilmir Snær Guðnason and Björn Hlynur Haraldsson get their moments to shine in their displays of lackluster masculinity, Noomi Rapace steals the show with a genuinely masterful performance that is clearly too good for the content she is given throughout the feature. Rapace is vulnerable and desperate while still maintaining a confidence and strength. She might be defenseless to her inner demons and emotional trauma but is still very much in control of how she deals with those around her as seen when Pétur continually tries to make sexual advancements towards her. The best moments of Lamb are when these three are hanging out, getting drunk, and having fun. Largely, these scenes are the only scenes in the feature that feel like they have a personality or infections energy as sadly the rest of the film comes across as beyond boring and dull.
For a film with such a unique and out-there concept, Lamb sadly feels largely hollow and bland. While there are various conversations started throughout the film's 106-minute runtime, the majority of the film is spent sitting with these characters on the farm with nothing of true substance fully solidifying. One could look at Lamb as a tale of blindly attempting to find closure from grief but its fantastical elements neglect this conversation. It also seems like the film might be curious at looking at the concept of farming and how humanity treats species differently but this also is confusingly neglected from a narrative standpoint. The decision to make the half-sheep half-human child which gets named Ada be a hybrid actually feels like a damming choice the film makes.
While on paper, it undeniably helps the film stand out, narratively the film does nothing with this choice and instead attempts to have conversations that clearly would work best if Ada was simply pure sheep. Without massive changes to the focus however, this change still wouldn't have been enough to save the feature overall. It also is incredibly problematic for the film's effectiveness to have the character have the face of a lamb. The film will use intimate shots of Ada to convey emotion as a film would a human actor. This fails, however, as lambs do not have that expressive of faces and audiences naturally don't know how to read them anyway. When it cuts to Ada, it is hard without context clues to figure out what emotion is being portrayed, yet the film has full confidence in this choice for some reason.
Without getting into spoilers, the final 10-minutes of the film also demands discussion. While Lamb might be marketed as a horror film, this identity only comes through in the vague creature lurking outside which comes up only a couple of times throughout the film before its conclusion. This concept is nothing new for the horror genre but it must be said how refreshing it feels for a film to go for it without needing to use cheap tricks like dream sequences. There is a definitive end and answer to this mystery, and while it means absolutely nothing to the wider film and comes out of nowhere with the audience being none the wiser the film is ending even 10-minutes before the credits roll, it still at least feels respectable within the genre it belongs to.
Lamb is a difficult film to process fully. While it is clearly a film with potential both thematically and technically, outside of Noomi Rapace, it really struggles to leave an impact. It is simply boring with nothing of note or importance forming. It almost is frustrating how uninteresting Lamb ends up being, considering its potential, but the audience will likely be so bored by the viewing experience that even the fire given by this anger will die rather quickly.
