You’d be forgiven for seeing the trailer for A24’s newest self-proclaimed “horror” film Lamb and thinking the uber-popular indie studio had another Icelandic Midsommar on their hands. It had everything: the breathtaking scenery, moody atmosphere and strange hook in the titular lamb-human hybrid. In actuality Lamb is a beast of a completely different nature; an extremely metaphorical slow burn that may leave you with more questions than answers. Not a horror film so much as an intense exercise in keeping the audience guessing, a pair of powerhouse performances from Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason just aren’t enough to overcome the needlessly glacial pace on the way to an all too abrupt conclusion.
Living on a remote farmland in Iceland are married couple Maria (Rapace) and Ingvar (Guðnason), alone except for their dog, cat and barnful of sheep, whom they care for day in and day out with nary a word said between them. This is clearly a couple with a lot of history and more than their fair share of baggage and you get the sense that their relationship has seen better days. Their somber existence changes for the better with the shocking arrival of Ada – a lamb borne of a sheep but with a human body – who the couple instantly adopt as their own child, never questioning her strange arrival or making much of a fuss about the fact that their “daughter” would happily eat grass instead of the human meals they feed her to feed their own illusion. Things take a turn for the fledgling family with the arrival of Ingvar’s brother Pétur, whose arrival threatens to unearth long buried secrets, not to mention the constant presence of an unseen malevolent creature stalking the farmland.
That premise on its own is tough enough for an audience to get behind, yet first-time director Valdimar Jóhannsson rarely steers his story into more palatable, mainstream territory. Take the opening 20 minutes for example. Largely wordless, they are a true test of an audience’s patience, as Maria and Ingvar simply go about their lives as usual before the arrival of Ada. It certainly shouldn’t take that long to set up the couple and their troubles but you can’t deny that the atmosphere Jóhansson sets isn’t effective, slowly building tension and doubt in your mind that something could go wrong at any moment. Once Ada does arrive we’re treated to another long stretch before she is shown in all her strange glory, a reveal perhaps not as effective as Jóhannson might like given the prominence of Ada in the film’s marketing.
From here the film’s structure becomes more evident, with Jóhansson treading water in between these pivotal moments that shift Maria and Ingvar’s relationship. You get the sense that each of these moment is moving the story towards something larger but to what you can never quite be sure, and the end result isn’t enough to justify the interminably long periods of nothing much at all happening between them. So much of the run-time is spent in these painfully self-indulgent sequences that by the time things begin to truly ramp up the film is over. It is one thing to subvert people’s expectations – and Jóhansson almost always takes a left when you expect a right – but to waste the audience’s time lingering on shots that don’t have any significance, simply to let them sit and stew in the confusion for a while longer doesn’t increase the profundity of the ending, it only makes people more exasperated by the journey.
Where the true balancing act is in Lamb’s tone. While largely billed as a horror film, the true genre lies somewhere between that and a fairy tale. There’s an inherent humour to the very concept of Ada that will have you chuckling at all her cute little mannerisms, but the heavy tone underlying all of this makes it so you never feel like this is intentional. It almost seems as if the film wants to have its cake and eat it too, finding physical humour in Ada’s weirdness before pivoting into a serious scene and expecting you to not view that scene through the same humorous lens, even though Ada is still waddling around in a ridiculous little outfit.
At its core Lamb is the story of Maria and Ingvar’s relationship and how grief has affected them both together and on an individual level. Ada’s significance isn’t so much in the fact that she is part human, part lamb, but in how her arrival allows for the couple to heal and reform their marital bonds. Ingvar is more than happy to move beyond their tragedy and throw himself into this new life but there is a lingering sense that Maria is still tortured by their past. She become’s fiercely protective of her new “daughter” and Rapace is fiery in the role, able to shift gears in an instant and raise the intensity. Guðnason is more restrained in his role, happy to be moving and seemingly oblivious to any goings on between his wife and brother or the fact that his adopted daughter is a lamb. It’s a pair of performances that play well both in the literal sense of the story and the deeply metaphorical, existential plane that the story steers into; worthy of revisiting even if the film itself might require masterful patience to do so.
Lamb is not an easily definable film, nor is it one that can be instantly understood. Valdimar Jóhannsson keeps the narrative small but goes thematically huge in his debut, crafting an intricately metaphorical modern fairy tale that is simply too slow to justify; the story ending just as it seems to really be kicking off. Rapace and Guðnason command the screen when the writing is there for them to do so but this is the slowest of slow burns, with a lot of the runtime filled with Jóhannsson meandering around the picturesque Icelandic farmland. It definitely won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but one thing is for sure: Lamb is no sheepish debut.
Lamb stars Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason & Björn Hlynur Haraldsson – In cinemas now.