Lamb — like the meat — is not to everyone’s taste. The A24 Icelandic folk horror is methodically paced taking its time to reveals its characters, its strange, unearthly conceit, and ultimately its grief-stricken heart.
Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guonason) struggling under a stifling and unspoken grief are a married couple on a potato and sheep ranch in the isolated and austere 
Icelandic landscape. In the spring a strange and unnatural lamb’s birth upsets their repetitive life as the couple bonds and adopts the lamb as though it were their own child. Ingvar’s brother and failed musician Petur (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) arrival at the ranch coinciding with Maria’s disposing of the lamb’s sheep birth mother further complicates their lives until in the film’s final scenes mysteries and tragedies are revealed.
Lamb’s pace in deliberate and steady making other slow-burn horror films, such as Robert Eggers The Witch, seem frenetic and hurried in comparison. Director Valdimar Johannsson and Cinematographer Eli Arenson build Lamb out of long take that linger on the characters, their silent reactions, unspoken pain, and the majestic, foreboding, mist-shrouded mysterious mountains thar encircle the ranch, isolating it from the world and its rationality. The landscape presenting Iceland in stark, unforgiving, and yet beautiful images rivals the grandeur John Ford’s work in Monument Valley.
Rapace, who also executively produced the film, plays Maria with an ever-present sense of loss and the choice to present the acclaimed with little make-up displaying her natural freckled face further reinforces the stark cold reality of the film as it embraces a folklore like fantasy at its heart.
Lamb is not a film for someone seeking high adrenaline bloody ‘kills,’ but rather for those inclined for a sedate but steadily a growing sense of dread.
Lamb is currently playing in select theaters.
My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,
