‘Lamb’ Review: Shear Brilliance

[peekaboo]

An Icelandic drama follows isolated farmers who’ve lost a child but receive an ovine surrogate

Let’s start with one of the countless details, tiny and large, that make “Lamb” a tale of hypnotic beauty—and one with a wild and woolly premise that could have gone howlingly wrong. It’s what we see immediately after the Icelandic heroine, María, sits down to calm herself by playing the piano. (She’s played powerfully in her turn by Noomi Rapace. ) As the first notes are heard, the camera peers inside the instrument at the hammers hitting the strings to make the music. What’s that all about? Well, the hammers are made of felt, which comes from wool, which comes from sheep.

“Lamb,” playing in theaters with English subtitles, is sheepcentric, not to mention eccentric, and the quirky shot contributes to the tone of the film, a debut feature by Valdimar Jóhannsson that is delicately droll as well as frightening, fearlessly silly and weirdly profound. ( Eli Arenson did the elegantly austere cinematography. Þórarinn Guðnason wrote the music. Björn Viktorsson created the haunting sound design.)

María and her husband, Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), are sheep farmers in rural Iceland, a near-polar opposite of Brigadoon where soaring mountains and verdant, fog-swept valleys signal that sinister things can happen. The wife and husband are alone with each other, having lost a child in the recent past. Their sense of loss, evoked with great subtlety, is suddenly banished by the birth of a lamb who—I’m not telling you anything the trailer doesn’t disclose—walks upright, is at least half human and, as the mute, cute and curly-coated creature grows into toddlerhood, is partial to wearing a bright blue sweater around the house. That is to say, María and Ingvar have been blessed, or so it would seem, with a new life to nurture. Seldom has a father’s love been put to a stranger test, or a mother’s love been more intense. 

It’s easy to make light of the narrative’s goofy side, but that’s OK—this is a shaggy lamb story expertly told. (There’s also a vividly alert sheep dog named Dog.) The filmmaker and his cast, which includes Björn Hlynur Haraldsson as Pétur, Ingvar’s black-sheep brother, play an intricate game of drawing us in by mixing whimsy, even humor, with a growing sense of dread. The exquisitely slow reveal of the infant’s physique is a study in classically suspenseful storytelling. In scene after scene we don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait, especially because of Ms. Rapace’s presence.

Noomi Rapace in ‘Lamb’

Photo: A24

Those who have followed the Swedish star’s career—she speaks Icelandic here—will remember, i.e. never forget, her as the ferociously focused, ambisexual Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander in the 2009 “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and two other films based on the “Millennium” series of crime novels by Stieg Larsson. María has her moments of ferocity, usually directed at a particular ewe. For the most part, though, Ms. Rapace portrays her with a quicksilver mix of severity and serenity. It’s a commanding performance in a singular movie that’s almost perfect, in an eerie way, except for its failure to subtitle Dog’s barks. How does such a smart pooch feel about what the sheepish stork brought?