Do Icelanders dream of anthropomorphic sheep? In writer-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s audaciously bizarre debut feature, a grieving couple welcome the birth of a mysterious half-human, half-animal baby on their remote sheep farm and decide to raise it as their own child. The set-up sounds like absurdist comedy but Lamb maintains an admirably sober tone throughout, drawing on elements of horror, family psychodrama, supernatural thriller and dark fairy tale without ever fully settling on an easily definable genre. The cumulative effect is eerily beautiful and strangely moving, even if questions remain whether any substance lies behind the film’s boldly WTF premise.
Featuring a superlative headline performance by Noomi Rapace, who also serves as executive producer, Lamb world-premiered in Cannes, where it earned polarised but mostly positive reviews, plus a jury prize for originality. This Icelandic-Swedish-Polish co-production has since been named as Iceland’s official Oscar submission in the Best International Film category, and recently became the most successful Icelandic feature ever to be released in the U.S., where high-end cult-movie specialists A24 are handling its theatrical run.
Jóhannsson comes to feature directing after almost two decades of special effects and technical crew credits on major film and TV productions including Game of Thrones, Prometheus and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. With that background we might have expected Lamb to be a shop window for flashy effects, but in fact the human-sheep hybrid is sparingly depicted using a mix of puppets, prosthetics, digital trickery, child actors and real lambs. Indeed, Jóhannsson makes viewers wait until midway through the film before first revealing the full uncanny creature in a fairly low-key manner. The dominant special effects here are human emotions, not creature-feature designs.
María (Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Gudnason) are a 40-ish couple sharing a bleak, lonely existence on a sheep farm in Iceland’s rugged highlands. They are haunted by tragedy, the death of their young daughter Ada. So when one of their pregnant ewes mysteriously gives birth to a humanoid lamb, María takes it as a sign that fate is giving her a second chance at motherhood. She and Ingvar decide to raise the child as their own, even naming it Ada.
But all this cosy domestic equilibrium is disrupted by jealous agitation from Ada’s biological mother, which eventually drives her inter-species rival María to take desperate measures. Further tension comes with the unexpected arrival of Invgar’s boozy bohemian brother Pétur (Bjo?rn Hlynur Haraldsson), a penniless former pop star who reacts with incredulous hostility to Ada while drunkenly trying to seduce María, hinting at a furtive affair in their past. Meanwhile, Jóhannsson drops spooky clues about further external threats prowling around the farm, fantastic beasts with dark designs on Ada’s new family.
Lamb is a work of strong formal elegance, sparse on dialogue but big on visual storytelling. Eli Arenson’s camerawork favours strikingly composed static shots, ominous slow glides and magnificent vistas of Iceland’s elemental, other-worldly landscape. A muted colour scheme of chilly blues and rusty browns amplifies this sense of austere beauty, as does Thórarinn Gudnason’s sparely deployed, nerve-jangling score.
Most of all, Lamb is a great vehicle for Rapace, who was born in Sweden but grew up on a family farm in Iceland. Usually typecast in action thriller roles, she relishes a rare chance to display her broader dramatic range here, and to do so in Icelandic, one of five languages in which she is fluent. With no hint of headline-star showboating, she radiates subtle intensity and wounded rage as a bereaved mother struggling to claw back karmic redress from a cruel, vengeful cosmos that turns out to contain terrifying secrets beyond her comprehension.
Critics of Lamb have questioned whether it adds up to more more than a deluxe genre exercise with no deeper resonance beyond its cryptic suspense plot. Many have highlighted how the story alludes to Icelandic folklore and to anthropomorphic deities from Indian and Greek tradition. Strangely, most reviews have missed the explicitly Christian symbolism here: a mother named María, a supernatural conception, a miracle baby born in a barn, not to mention Biblical notions of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb. Jóhannsson may not intend an overtly religious allegory, but he is at least playing mischievous games with these familiar narrative tropes.
Lamb certainly comes with a rich cultural hinterland. Veteran Hungarian art-house icon Béla Tarr, Jóhannsson’s former mentor at his Film Factory talent farm in Sarajevo, is credited as executive producer while Icelandic poet, novelist and frequent Björk collaborator Sjón – aka Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson – worked on the screenplay. The director also thanks numerous cinematic luminaries in the end credits, from Tilda Swinton to Carlos Reygadas, and cites inspiration from paintings by Turner, Rembrandt, Dürer and more. Arguably all this name-dropping is designed to give unearned gravitas to a patently preposterous fantasy yarn, but director and cast invest the material with commendable seriousness, playing to the story’s deeper tragedy more than its sensational surface elements. Even if Jóhannsson is pulling the wool over our eyes, he has created a haunting, atmospheric and boldly original debut.
Director: Valdimar Jóhannsson
Screenwriters: Sjo?n, Valdimar Jóhannsson
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Gudnason, Bjo?rn Hlynur Haraldsson, Ingvar Sigurdsson
Producers: Hrönn Kristinsdóttir, Sara Nassim, Piodor Gustafsson, Erik Rydell, Klaudia Smieja-Rostworowska, Jan Naszewski
Executive producers: Noomi Rapace, Béla Tarr, Håkan Petterson, Jon Mankell, Marcin Drabinski, Peter Possne, Zuzanna Hencz
Cinematography: Eli Arenson
Editing: Agnieszka Glinska
Music: Thórarinn Gudnason
Production companies: Go to Sheep (Iceland), Spark Film & TV (Sweden), Madants (Poland)
World Sales: New Europe Film Sales
In Icelandic
106 minutes
