Lamb, the finely photographed directorial debut of an Icelandic man, is something of a belated Christmas fairy tale. A fairy tale, however, in which horror will soon find its way.
Berlin – Anyone who has ever experienced Iceland will hardly ever forget the barren, inhospitable, at the same time wonderful, sometimes almost surreal landscape of the island in the North Atlantic.
This landscape, the flora and fauna of Iceland play a major role in this film. It’s about an Icelandic couple and a big, oversized desire to have children. The Swedish actress Noomi Rapace can be seen in one of the two main roles. The 42-year-old was best known for playing Lisbeth Salander in the film adaptation of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. The feature film debut of the Icelandic Valdimar Jóhannsson celebrated its premiere at the festival in Cannes in the summer of 2021.
A sheep as a human child
Maria (Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) live in a house surrounded by nature. Surrounded by high mountains, the peaks of which are partly covered with snow. They are not all alone: there is the black and white border collie, there is the cat, there are, not to be forgotten, the many, many sheep. Ingvar is already in the stable at six in the morning, and we hear from the radio that it’s Christmas.
What happens then actually comes very close to a festive miracle: One of the many lambs that are born in Marias (note the name) and Ingvar’s stable, one of these little sheep is different, even if you don’t even notice it at first. Ingvar and Maria take little Ada into the sparsely furnished living room. From now on Ada will be treated like a human child by both of them.
They both look after the lamb with touching tenderness. And suddenly you realize that this lamb has shockingly real human characteristics: there is the sweet little hand that pushes itself over the baby blanket in the cot, there is the round child’s bottom. Whether the parents only imagine these human attributes in their oversized desire to have children, or whether this human-animal hybrid is really a miracle of nature, the famous camera leaves that to the imagination of the cinema-goers, director Jóhannsson. But when Ingvar’s brother comes to visit, the parents have to put up with a few unsettling questions and odd looks.
Between horror and emotion
This film experiment, which has learned from US horror cinema (threatening strings, eerie back views) as well as from the reduced, barren Scandinavian film (the script was written by Jóhannsson together with Sjón, an author who has already worked with the Dane Lars von Trier) does not always make it easy for you. On the one hand, the care that Maria especially gives her little lamb is really touching. On the other hand, it seems a bit silly that the little bundle of fur suddenly sits with me at the dinner table, patting upright through the house in children’s clothes.
The parents’ desperate search for consolation goes to the heart. Other directors – including Roman Polanski with “Rosemary’s Baby” – have told even more convincingly about the horror surrounding newborns. “Dýrið”, as the Icelandic title is, is an exciting experiment. The uncomfortable feeling that primes the film from the start culminates in the question: Will nature take revenge?
Lamb, Iceland / Sweden / Poland 2020, 106 min., FSK from 16, by Valdimar Jóhannsson, with Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson dpa
