THE SILENCE OF THE ‘LAMB’
The first thing to notice about the unsettling Icelandic-language drama “Lamb” is that the animals are far more expressive than the people. It’s the horses, a dog, a cat and the oh-so-many sheep who actually seem to have emotions, not their taciturn human overseers, husband Ingvar and wife Maria, who grimly go about the business of running their isolated farm with little sense of family or frivolity.
For the first 40 minutes or so, as Ingvar (Hilmar Snaer Gudnason) and Maria (Noomi Rapace) live their hard but unremarkable lives set against the bleak beauty of the North Atlantic landscape, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s film seems more like some sort of National Geographic documentary about the rigors of surviving in rural Iceland. But, slowly, Jóhannsson — who wrote the script with acclaimed Icelandic novelist/ musician/Björk collaborator Sjón — slowly reveals the layers beneath the frigid emotional topsoil.
Ingvar and Maria are still mourning the loss of a child, no doubt contributing to the silence between them. Then Ingvar’s brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldson) — fresh from some shady deal that he’s running from — shows up unannounced looking for a place to crash for awhile. There’s also some history between Maria and Pétur, though Ingvar seems to be still in the dark.
The game changer is another unexpected guest, one born in the barn amid the clearly distressed sheep, who sense there’s something weird going on. But the hole in Ingvar and Maria’s life caused by the sadness over the lost baby is replaced by the joy of finding something else that needs to be cared for.
What follows is both magical and horrifying, in both the story itself and the movie’s visuals. Jóhannsson and Sjón tap into a sense of pre-Christian Icelandic folklore while special effects supervisor Freyr Ásgeirsson and cinematographer Eli Arenson bring it all to life, coming up with a film that’s a prime example of Scandinavian folk-horror. In other hands, “Lamb” could have just been silly, but here, it’s genuinely discomfiting, though not particularly scary.
How viewers respond to “Lamb,” which won an Un Certain Regard award at Cannes, depends on how much they buy the film’s central conceit. Gudnason and Rapace (who’s Swedish but spent her early years in Iceland and speaks the language) both possess a brooding intensity that helps make the whole thing believable.
Again, it’s the animals (and their wranglers) though who deserve the most recognition. After all, the film’s canine, Panda, also took home a prize at Cannes: the grand jury award in the Palm Dog Grand Prix competition. But it is really too bad that there isn’t a similar award for sheep.