A Filmmaker's Review: "The Other Lamb" (2019)

I feel like this film was a serious underachiever in its attempt to remain context-free because of the way context kept seeping in through the story.

The film “The Other Lamb” (2019) is about a cult of women who follow around a man through the woods, they are forced to move as the police tells the leader of the cult and as time goes on, one of the ‘daughters’ of the cult becomes more and more self-aware despite having no contact with the outside world. After a while, her behaviour becomes more and more wild to the rest of the cult and even the cult leader is aware of this, but decides to let it slide if she gives herself to him, I believe. It’s really hard to tell whether he sees it or not because if he really doesn’t see that she is clearly trying to break away, then he’s absolutely blind. The narrative is hindered by badly written speech and convoluted matter-of-fact points that appear here and there throughout. Here are the reasons why I would give it only a two out of five.

The first reason for giving it the two positive points are because of the acting of the lead actress. She did the very best she could with the bad script she was given and her acting was actually pretty amazing. She created a lot of atmosphere and basically carried the movie. I think that without her, the movie would have fallen completely flat. She was like the glue holding the movie together, making it interesting and enthralling to watch. This was not because of her story, but because of her constant overwhelmed reactions which were uncomfortable to watch.

However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the film. The main problem which plagued the film was the jittery storytelling. The film, I understand, tried to remain without context. There was not going to be a massive backstory told to us under the decision of writer and director. But, the problem with that is the main character is supposed to have a backstory that impacts the rest of the story. What we now have is a story which is telling us facts about the cult when we need to know them, almost making it up as they go along. We only know about the mother when someone compares her looks to her mother’s. But after this, we only know that her mother is dead because one woman in the cult happens to know about her. So this director is going to tell me that this bunch of people have only had each other for all this time and it is after all these years have only decided to communicate about this in this exact moment? It does not seem realistic. A teenager would come to know about their mother being dead at a much younger age that this girl seemed in the film. I believe that it was quite the mistake to make a lot of the rebellion in the story rely on the fact that the mother dying reflected upon another member of the group dying. It made things context-reliant when context just was not there.

Another thing I thought was done wrong in this film was the premise of the cult itself. There is nothing to this cult. We do not know the ritual or background. They are every single television-style cult ever and I, again, do not feel like this is a true representation of a cult. I understand many of them were born into the cult but there is nothing that gives this cult any identity and yet, we are supposed to believe in this random cult and its ability to round up a bunch of young women into one place and basically hand over their human rights to someone else. The psychological symptoms of being led into the cult are just non-existent, This makes us feel distant and often bored as the audience has seen this too many times before.

I believe that if you want a good to great cult-driven horror film of 2019, then Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” is more than effective. However, I did not find “The Other Lamb” was a horror at all. Possibly a grotesque drama, but definitely not a horror film.