The Other Lamb review – artful cult drama simmers with unease
At the outset of The Other Lamb, a disquieting little drama landing online this week, we’re dropped into familiar yet fertile territory. A charismatic and handsome male leader has assembled a group of subservient female followers living together in the wild, hanging on his every word. Like most cults, it’s one based on a rigid and regressive set of gender norms. He speaks, they listen. He demands, they comply. He takes, they give.
The many fascinating questions such a dynamic raises – the hows and whys, logistically and psychologically – have given cults an ongoing prominence on screen, from The Wicker Man all the way through to Wild Wild Country. How does a collective belief in something so outwardly unhinged sustain itself, and how long can that realistically last? In the English-language debut from the acclaimed Polish filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska, we join a group already steeped in its own traditions, dictated by the Shepherd (Michiel Huisman). There are wives and sisters, all of whom are guided by his word, his control of their narrative so suffocating that even stories not told by him are forbidden.
As one of the sisters, Selah (Raffey Cassidy), comes of age, the love and respect she’d always held for her leader starts to show cracks. The atmosphere he’s created doesn’t allow for independent thought or for women to possess any agency, but the more she starts to learn about the Shepherd and what happens when he deigns to give a chosen follower his “grace”, the more her entire belief system starts to unravel.
Gliding close to genre tropes but moving more comfortably as an uneasy drama about the alarming power of blind faith, The Other Lamb is an intriguing mood piece, strikingly made and well-performed if not quite as powerful as it could have been. It’s a slow burn, flickering quietly as it shows us Selah’s gradual, horrifying realisation of what she’s a part of and Catherine S McMullen’s spare script does a nifty job of likening a certain form of religious fervour to being in an abusive relationship. There are dream sequences that err further toward horror territory but it’s ultimately a tale of sadness, of women duped by a monster, one who fooled them into thinking he knew something they didn’t. In one of the more poignant moments, Selah asks one of his wives, now deemed “broken” and forced to live close to yet separate from the group, why she’s stayed for so long. “Because … I’m afraid,” she replies. “I’ve been here for so long, I don’t know who I am any