Movie Review: 'Lamb' Starring Noomi Rapace

Lamb is a bizarre and brilliant new film from Icelandic filmmaker Valdimar Johannson. The film stars Noomi Rapace as Maria and Hilmur Snaer Guonason as Maria’s husband, Ingvar. The two lead a rather mundane life as sheep herders and farmers in a lonely but utterly gorgeous patch of land in Iceland. Their existence is serene and routine, tending to the sheep, fixing the tractor, tilling the land for planting and harvesting, and so on.

Drama and the nature of film dictates that something must break the monotony of Maria and Ingvar’s existence but you cannot begin to imagine, unless you’ve seen the trailer, what that monotony breaking moment is. Few things can prepare you for the odd and brilliant turn that Lamb takes as Maria and Ingvar are going through the typical motions of helping one of their sheep give birth. What they find is something so out of this world, so beyond understanding that it kind of makes sense that their reaction is almost no reaction at all.

The discovery here is so stunning that Maria and Ingvar seem to each arrive at an incalculable level of trauma that not talking about is the only way to deal with it. That and taking the new baby into their home to raise as their own child, whom they name Ada. Now, if you haven’t seen the trailer for Lamb, you are probably wondering what they could possibly have found while helping one of their sheep give birth? Was it an alien? No, what is it? What could it possibly be? Well…

Eventually, time passes and Ingvar’s brother arrives on the farm unexpectedly. Petur, played by Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson, is a troublemaker and someone who often finds himself in debt and trouble on a regular basis. When we meet Petur he’s being pulled out of the trunk of someone’s car and his things are being chucked into a ditch. Was he the victim of a kidnapping? Is he so dangerous that no one wanted to ride with him if he weren’t in the trunk? What the heck is going on? There are no answers to this but a ton of weird intrigue that I really enjoyed.

That’s really a good way to look at Lamb as a whole lot of weirdly inspired intrigue and strange suspense. At the core of Lamb is something so bizarre, fascinating and mysterious that you can’t help but get caught up in how it will evolve and resolve. Director Johannson has so incredibly crafted this stillness, this peace and calm that when it is broken you get a chill up your spine. Moments of incident occur and break the peace and it is like a jump scare in a horror movie but much, much smarter.

The fragility of the peace of this story is where the tension lies. No one wants to question or comment on the central focus of this story and thus when someone does it’s upsetting and thrilling. Petur is the first to actually say WTF to this situation and where his story goes from there is a growing sense of disquiet and terror that crescendos just as we reach the midpoint and the story breaks into the final half of the movie with even more oddity and intrigue as to where this is all going.

I am doing a lot of tap dancing around the central concept of Lamb because I would love for you to see the movie with the same sense of confusion and fascination that I did. It would be even better if you saw it without seeing the trailer. Going in blind, I imagine, would only make Lamb even more thrilling. I saw the trailer, which is very good and certainly made me want to watch it, but I wish I hadn’t seen it as I imagine the power of this movie would only be greater if you didn’t know ahead of time.

Lamb is one of the best movies of 2021. It’s a strange, atmospheric, and thrilling movie even as it is mostly silent and built from everything that is not said and everything that might happen and doesn’t. It’s so wild and so clever and so much of that comes from the remarkable patience of director Johannson to let scenes linger, to allow motivations to be unexplained and unexplored and to let the tension seep in through the silence surrounding what will be some stunning reveals.

Lamb opened in theaters nationwide from A24 on October 15th, 2021.