Valimar Johannsson's "Lamb": Disappointingly Mild

By: Mckenna Lloyd

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

"Lamb," while anticipated to be a perfect blend of horror and suspense, was a disappointing, drama-driven film, and not at all a disturbing horror movie. The movie premiered on Oct. 8 in the United States and was released by A24.

My expectations were that "Lamb" would be gruesome and intriguing. Having seen advertisements all over social media, my assumptions were solely based on Instagram and Twitter ads.

Anyone who has seen the trailers for Valimar Johannsson's "Lamb" will expect the movie to be a chilling experience of Scandinavian horror. Shots of a lamb walking upright, sheep staring deeply into the camera, and the characters breathing heavily with anxious eyes compose the film's trailers, setting an expectation for titillation.

Unfortunately, the film falls flat. It provides some engaging shots of emotive animal actors, suspenseful romantic drama, and a bizarre blurring of fantasy and reality, without gore, terror, or anything truly off-putting. "Lamb" is eerie, to be sure, but the set up of the trailers would have audiences believe they are engaging in a film that will put them on edge. Instead, they are given a movie that is much closer to an off-the-cuff romance than a modern folk horror.

The film centers on a childless husband and wife who are sheep farmers living miles from the nearest bus stop or town. The two are reserved around each other, dealing with relationship tension amidst their large herd of birthing ewes and newly-born lambs. The audience is treated to several lamb births within the first twenty minutes of the movie. A particular ewe gives birth in the presence of the ever quiet husband and wife, Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace), though when her baby breeches, an unusual lamb is born. The reveal of the abnormal lamb's body is one of the main elements of suspense in the film. It is revealed that the lamb is half-sheep, half-human, characterized by a mostly human body with the exception of its head and right arm.

While the revelation of the lamb's half-human body prepares the watcher for something monstrous, the final product is much cuter than expected. Ingvar and Maria effectively adopt the female lamb, naming her Ada, and take her away from her sheep mother. The constant sound of the mother sheep’s baaing drives Maria to madness and she shoots the true mother of her lamb child. This act is the second out of the three most classically horrifying events of the movie, the first being the lamb's body reveal after her birth.

Distracting from what could have been a creepy, evocative film, "Lamb" jets off into a romance triangle drama when Ingvar's brother Petur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) shows up at the farm. At first skeptical of his brother and sister-in-law's choice to raise a lamb as if it is a person, Petur eventually ditches his skepticism and becomes a perfectly doting uncle. He does this while also attempting to seduce Maria, a woman who only wants a happy family.

The third and final horrifying scene (which I won't spoil) ends the film and destroys the perfect, happy family Maria thought she had finally obtained. The ending is both anticlimactic and surprisingly tame in terms of gore, though there is some.

As the credits rolled, I thought to myself, "What was the point of that?" The film's thematic message is unclear. While thinking it over, I wondered whether the point was simply to play off of an Icelandic myth, or to be a subtle and unorthodox Christ narrative. If the former option, a message evoked by the invocation of Icelandic myth makes audiences unfamiliar with Icelandic myth disadvantaged in gaining a new perspective. If the latter, the Christ narrative "Lamb" presents is cynical and dark, downplaying the redemption message of a more traditional Christ parallel.

Clearly, there is a spectrum of choices for the final takeaway of "Lamb," but none are satisfying or indicative that the film really was a disturbing horror movie. "Lamb," instead, is a visually eerie drama worth watching for the evocative shots of sheep and sad couples, perhaps as an alternative to something truly scary.