Post by Dracula on Nov 21, 2021 15:26:51 GMT -5
Lamb(10/10/2021)
The A24 distributed Icelandic film Lamb made quite the splash when its oddball trailer presented itself earlier this year, and while the film itself is interesting I’m not sure it lives up to the promise shown in that trailer. The film is about a husband and wife who tend to a sheep farm in a very remote rural area in Iceland who are shocked to find that one of their pregnant sheep has given birth to a half-human/half-sheep hybrid child with the head of a lamb and the body of a human (and no, neither the husband nor any other human character is the father). The two decide to take this strange entity into their lives and raise it like a human child without too much concern about how this may seem odd to others. Interesting set-up but this leads to a movie that becomes much less about this lamb than you might think. The A24 name and general weirdness of all this might lead you to suspect this is a horror film, but it isn’t really (though there are a couple elements of that), instead it kind of becomes a domestic drama as the husband’s brother shows up and it’s implied that he and the wife have had feelings for each other in the past. So the film becomes awfully distracted by this love triangle for a decent amount of its runtime which is kind of baffling given that there’s a damn human sheep hybrid walking around in the background of all this. Director Valdimar Jóhannsson does shoot all this against some beautiful scenery and does have a clear sense of style in how he makes the movie and the movie has a suitably wacky ending that saves the movie a little bit, but I must say the movie sure buries the lead to a baffling degree at times and at the end of the day I’m not exactly sure what it was saying.
**1/2 out of Five
The A24 distributed Icelandic film Lamb made quite the splash when its oddball trailer presented itself earlier this year, and while the film itself is interesting I’m not sure it lives up to the promise shown in that trailer. The film is about a husband and wife who tend to a sheep farm in a very remote rural area in Iceland who are shocked to find that one of their pregnant sheep has given birth to a half-human/half-sheep hybrid child with the head of a lamb and the body of a human (and no, neither the husband nor any other human character is the father). The two decide to take this strange entity into their lives and raise it like a human child without too much concern about how this may seem odd to others. Interesting set-up but this leads to a movie that becomes much less about this lamb than you might think. The A24 name and general weirdness of all this might lead you to suspect this is a horror film, but it isn’t really (though there are a couple elements of that), instead it kind of becomes a domestic drama as the husband’s brother shows up and it’s implied that he and the wife have had feelings for each other in the past. So the film becomes awfully distracted by this love triangle for a decent amount of its runtime which is kind of baffling given that there’s a damn human sheep hybrid walking around in the background of all this. Director Valdimar Jóhannsson does shoot all this against some beautiful scenery and does have a clear sense of style in how he makes the movie and the movie has a suitably wacky ending that saves the movie a little bit, but I must say the movie sure buries the lead to a baffling degree at times and at the end of the day I’m not exactly sure what it was saying.
**1/2 out of Five
