Lamb (2021)

About a week ago, we discussed Alex Garland’s infamous A24 folk horror film Men, which is a handy reference that we’ll make ample use of while this week's A24 folk horror film. You see, Men was a film that screamed: “Not for everyone.” It used metaphor, allegory, and postmodern storytelling to take on the patriarchy, itself a contentious thing to address, and it didn’t even have the decency to turn out to all be a dream in the end, so naturally it was hated by most mainstream viewers. For me, though, recognizing that it wasn’t for everyone didn’t harm my own enjoyment of it one bit, and besides it being a little too obviously inspired by another recent A24 folk horror film, Midsommar, I thought its wild ideas and overall nightmarish construction was effective and incredibly intriguing. 

So what does any of this have to do with Lamb? The simple answer is that the two are perfect foils of one another. While Men took the arthouse route and did something interesting and entertaining enough to make it worth recommending to those who are into that sort of thing, I find myself seriously doubting if the same could be said of Lamb.

An international co-production between Iceland, Sweden, and Poland, it takes a very old-school approach to its plot and puts a unique spin on the concept of magical realism. The film quickly establishes its tiny cast with as close to zero exposition as you can get, and then has something inexplicable and impossible happen to them. Thanks to the way they handle this situation, they are roundly punished in the end all in service of a pretty conventional moral lesson, and that’s your lot.

Lamb takes minimalism to its extreme, handling its core Aesop fable as if it were David Lowry’s Ghost Story or something. It’s clearly in no hurry at any given time, and there are long stretches where no dialogue of any kind is uttered. Combine this with a generally foggy sense of time and place (befitting its nature as a folk tale) and a willingness to go into very unexpected and uncomfortable places with its grounded family drama, and you have something destined to be hated by close-minded viewers.

Wool over the eyes

The premise is fascinating and handled rather well, at first anyway. Rather than put all its cards on the table from the off, the film instead allows us to stew in our impotent questions like “What the hell is happening?” and “Is this really going to be the whole movie?” for a while before a reveal that truly is shocking. You see, the premise is vague and ambiguous up until this point: on Christmas night, a miraculous conception occurs, where one of the protagonists’ sheep becomes pregnant under mysterious circumstances and soon gives birth to something equal parts beautiful and horrifying. For some reason that is not made clear to us until close to the halfway point, Noomi Rapace’s character instantly claims the lamb as her own, taking it from its mother, dressing it up in human clothes, giving it a name, and eventually even taking steps to get rid of its mother when she just won’t let it go. The simplicity of the narrative works wonders because even though there are a few crucial details missing for quite a while (What’s special about this lamb? Why does Noomi Rapace have all this baby stuff lying around?) it’s not hard to fill them in for yourself, though their eventual reveals are no less shocking despite this.

So for folk horror enthusiasts, who tend to veer towards the academic side of things in general, none of this should sound like an issue. That is, until the ending comes, and all the goodwill the film had established up until that point was all but dashed instantly. It’s not that anything particularly shocking or offensive happens, and it’s not even that the film takes any kind of obvious wrong turn, it’s just that it makes you look back at all the time you’ve spent with Lamb and think: “Huh, that was it?” Sure, there are moments here and there where I felt wrapped up in what was happening, but I generally felt kind of distant from the almost nonexistent narrative and did not care for a lot of the family drama that was used to fill in the gaps (mostly during the second half; the stuff between the two main characters and the lamb is great during the first,) which meant the uncompromising ending just felt like a joke to me. All I could think to myself was “This must be how people feel about films I like.” I have gone over the events of the film over and over again, and while it’s clear that every decision was motivated by a singular vision, I just happen to think that vision is kind of damp. I mean, I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched an A24 film where you’re promised one thing and get something totally different, usually quieter and more uncomfortable, but my god. Lamb feels as though it attempts to strip the story of every bit of narrative and subtext it can to make it as universal as it can, but I just feel that that approach isn’t ideal in a film where so little actually happens; all you’re left with is the husk of an inspired idea, no end of breathtaking vistas and visuals, a few really great performances, and something that resembles a hard STOP more so than an ending. Under different circumstances, such things might add up to far more than the sum of their parts, but that’s not the case here.

It puts me in a tough spot, because while I think the film will certainly be of interest to many fans of the recent folk horror revival, I also imagine that more than a few of them will have the same reaction as I did: that of a total numbness to it. Perhaps I waited too long before watching it and allowed myself to build up this image of what I thought the premise would entail, but it’s hard to say at this point. In any case, I found myself let down by Lamb and its limp, unsatisfying third act, and as such, I can’t recommend it in good faith to anyone but the most extreme of arthouse cinema nerds, and even then: arthouse cinema is best at provoking a strong reaction, right? And Lamb, as I said earlier, only seems to provoke numbness. Its ending and premise are certainly memorable, but none of the details of its languid narrative stand out particularly to me now, only a week and some days since I watched it. And besides that, I just don't see myself going back to it anytime soon. So despite all its good intentions, I have to give it a pass.