Lamb 4K 2021 ICELANDIC Ultra HD 2160p

The film tells about spouses who cannot have children. One day, as if God himself presents them with a gift, when the heroes find a newborn lamb on the farm. However, they do not know what danger this event has prepared for them.

Lamb 4K Review
Maria (Rapas) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snair Gudnason) live and work on a remote farm in Iceland. The couple is childless, but one day they discover a mysterious creature in their barn and decide to raise it as their child. With him, happiness first comes to the family, and after it, terrible consequences.

The Lamb is best described by the cinematic universe to which it tacitly belongs: A24's barnyard, a dream factory famous for depicting animals often in a demonic, strictly ambiguous way. Among the superhero horde, Black Philip the goat from The Witch by Robert Eggers, pesky gulls in his Lighthouse, the bear from Solstice (or its shell), the fox (s) in the recent The Legend of the Green Knight ". In The Lamb, everything mystical is concentrated on the herd of sheep, which are nurtured by the central couple. The constant reception of childbirth in animals drives both spouses into gloomy thoughts: their time has either passed, or it has dragged on for a long time after the tragedy that allegedly happened earlier. “It turns out that they managed to invent a time machine,” Ingvar says at breakfast. “I would go to the past,” Maria replies resolutely, thoughtfully, with through trauma.

Debutant Valdimar Johannsson's film has already become a moderate US box office sensation in the arthouse segment, earning an impressive $2.5 million and becoming the first non-English-language project to do so since Parasite. It is not difficult to catch the director on the stylization of the previous works of the graduates of the genre - of course, that is present, pumping up the brand, thundering with the convex metaphoricality of the New Testament context. The Lamb, as God's intervention, can both make happy and curse the already unfortunate heroes, far from young Adam and Eve (or the parents of the Blessed Virgin Joachim and Anna), who live out their lives in isolation and celibacy. Their new and at the same time last hope is the hybrid girl Hell, born as a result of eschatological copulation left on the other side of the screen, stolen and appropriated by people. No matter how wild her origin may seem, Maria and Ingvar accept everything with obsessive gratitude, do not seek to explain to each other all the catastrophic and improbable nature of what happened - their process of mourning was so deafening all this time.

Johannsson does not suffer from arrogance, moves through the plot observantly and even with irony. He does not forget to share and synchronize the notorious bibleisms, colonialism (the use of foreign land and its fruits), the Icelandic latitudes that amaze the imagination are silent, seeing through mere mortals and their efforts in the fight against time. Delicately takes on the collapsing marriage, the most psychologically charged and intense part, the script practically does not sag, occasionally resorting to cheap shock (Johansson took Oscar nominee Sjon Sigurdsson, who worked on Dancer in the Dark, as co-authors).

Rapace delivers in The Lamb an outstanding dramatic performance, full of frenzy, impotence, permitted motherhood, desperate measures to keep it. After what she saw, one question remains: where are her offers from studios and already well-known directors? Having become famous for the original image of Lisbeth Salander, the Swede found herself in Hollywood of the second, and even the third echelon, which is simply insulting for her potential. Another surprise is hidden in the credits, where, in addition to Rapace, the Hungarian classic Bela Tarr, the creator of the Satanic Tango, unexpectedly appears among the executive producers. It’s hard to say what exactly his look brought to the film (and whether it brought it at all): “The Lamb” is for the most part standard, it is forced to be interested in metaphysics and does not climb high (it’s not a fact that it should at all). The very attention and presence of Tarr, as a pleasant addition, works and, probably, even nourishes in places.

Watching The Lamb after the next lockdown will require, if not a way out of suspended animation, then partial involvement, disposition for an internal battle, and finally, fanaticism from A24 products. Even less horror, more creepy drama that penetrates the mind, talking about the inscrutable ways of the messiah, who here is not a savior at all, and does not owe anything to anyone. He climbs the hills, always invisible, breathing heavily, bringing debtors not forgiveness, but perverted wisdom (see Solomon's solution) and a guaranteed lifelong hell, which is always themselves the cause.