Rating: C-
Somewhere in the 100-minute run time of Lamb is perfectly great 30-minute short. The film, which had its premiere earlier this year as part of the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, is no doubt a film with imagination to spare. However, imagination and premise do not a film make. The weirder the premise, of course, the harder it is for a film to sustain itself, and ultimately it feels that Lamb collapses under the weight of its designs.
There is something to be said about the importance of originality, and no doubt Lamb is as original a film as I have ever seen. And yet, the expectation is that the idea that fuels the film will help propel it towards something worth watching. As it is, however, Lamb is an idea all dressed up with nowhere to go.
In this case, I mean that pretty literally. Taking place on a secluded Icelandic ranch, Lamb is an intentionally isolating work that reflects the narrative themes and mindscape of its characters well enough and there’s no doubt that the picturesque beauty of the landscape, captured by cinematographer Eli Arenson, offers a haunting aesthetic to this dark fable. But it also serves as something of a metaphor for the fact that the story has no clear direction in which it can turn.
The film follows a childless couple, Maria and Ingvar (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason), who discover a mysterious, bipedal lamb in their barn. Adopting the creature as their own they…well…I guess that’s pretty much it? I mean, Ingvar’s brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), comes to visit, and he’s pretty weirded out for a minute but…yeah, no, that’s pretty much it.
While the aura of the supernatural hangs over the film, this is ostensibly a small scale family drama, complete with hints of previous infidelity between Maria and Pétur. Just, you know, with a bipedal lamb thrown in. The problem is that none of it particularly goes anywhere. While it’s hard to escape the notion of Baphomet, the half goat half human occult deity and current symbol of The Satanic Temple, nothing much ever comes from that. Just like nothing much ever comes from anything.
This, despite two really solid performances from Rapace and Guðnason. Both give solid turns and manage to capture the isolation and familiar boredom of both their routine and each other. They each lend good amounts of subtext to the script, co-written by Icelandic poet Sjón and Valdimar Jóhannsson (who also directs), which is already tense with banality.
The problem is that none of it ever goes anywhere. Beyond the novelty of its premise, there just isn’t much to Lamb that wouldn’t have better, and more interestingly, explored in a short film. I can give it credit for its reach, but that only takes you so far. In the end, execution matters, and while it’s definitely a beautiful film to look at, its beauty never adds up to anything particularly memorable.
Lamb is now playing in select theaters.
