One thing Orson Welles understood about movie-making was that a great motion picture, like any great work of art, tapped into a sense of the magical.  He also understood that the magic was not simply the final studio product, however released or presented theatrically, but something that happened in the space between the viewer and the stream of story and images unfurling across the screen.  (I’m not going to deny that there is also a sense of the ‘anti-magical’ to be found in certain species of great art—but even there, I would argue the magic is there by default and even acknowledged with a wink and a nod.)  In other words, we, the audience members, actively participate in the magic-making whether we’re aware of it or not.  (We mostly are aware of it.  But who really wants to talk about it and then break the magic spell?)

That magic has something to do with the magic of the everyday (which Freud may have partially characterized as pathology)—the magic of the molecular, the micro- and macro-phenomena we loosely refer to as Nature—the elemental bonds we resist, insulate and insist upon holding ourselves apart from, insist upon controlling in some limited fashion, yet can’t help acknowledging and accepting ultimate surrender to its cosmic command.

As it happens, we’re actually in thrall to cosmic commands, for which not incidentally we have a real talent for finding avatars to deliver, everywhere from stars and meteor showers (on the mystical/logical side of this spectrum) to TikTok (talking about the digital cyber-platform here, as opposed to the character who was also something of an avatar in the Oz domain)—which when you get right down to it is really just a digital extension of our bedrooms.  Or backyards.  Or barnyards—which is where we came upon some of the first of these.

Lamb comes at us as if from the cosmic void—a miasma of swirling wind, dust and ice—we could be circling a polar icecap as the ‘eye’ of this storm descends toward a desolate and blizzard-swept landscape of snow barrens and twilight.  Creatures move beneath us—we seem to spot a flock of sheep, but coming closer to the swirl we make out a herd of horses, which seem to divide themselves into strings crossing against each other in the whirling ice and snow.  As one flank moves angrily in one direction, the camera rushes headlong across the snowy landscape in another—towards a low-lying barn, full of sheep taking (it almost seems grateful) shelter from the storm.  In a film that in no small part scrutinizes relations between human and non-human animals, the inclination to anthropomorphize is not only to be expected but encouraged.

Entering the barn, with its ranks of sheep in their pens with limited ability to move around and only narrow access to each other or means of ingress and egress, we register their uncertainty and apprehension, their capacity for terror (though also, further into the film story, their curiosity).  Their alarm appears warranted as the small door vibrates with what sounds like—and is in fact—a battering ram, though it’s not clear why this sheep has been left outside the shelter.  Some suspenseful moments later, the ram breaches the small entry and collapses near death or exhaustion on the floor.

Moments later, we emerge from a different darkness into the softly lit interior of a house where Maria (Noomi Rapace—who we will learn runs this farm with her husband, Ingvar—Hilmir Snær Guðnason) is preparing to serve what might be part of a festive meal.  No further exposition, elaboration is offered to move the story forward.  And almost without exception, the film continues in this vein.  There is some development:  the film builds in brief, seemingly incidental encounters that nevertheless convey subtle transitions—until they’re suddenly abrupt, shockingly shorn of nuance—not that this necessarily leads us to clarity.  At various points, the razor-sharp, sometimes violent breaks only plant a seed, or a kind of egg to gestate with—‘what rough beast’?—assuming we’re moving in that direction; and as it happens, we are.

Lamb inevitably confronts our relationship with non-human animals, and more particularly the animals we exploit for the assets or resources (as we may see them) they carry upon themselves or within their native capacities, both renewable and non-renewable, and for food.  The director, Valdimar Jóhannsson, has also carefully framed the hierarchical relationships we have imposed upon the non-human animals we choose to attach to our communities.  The sheep (as sheep go) are well cared for and attended.  The couple have a good relationship with their dog—though the film makes clear this is first and foremost a working relationship.  The dog’s ‘place’—for eating, rest and sleep—is not in the main part of the couple’s house, although their cat enjoys these privileges.  This is in no small part a story of boundaries—conceived, perceived, built and maintained, confused, disrupted and violated.

We see fairly clearly that this is a serious working farm, with the couple sharing a range of tasks and responsibilities which are frequently arduous and time-consuming.  They are childless—though, as is pieced together in successive sequences, not for lack of trying.  Whether or not the couple, particularly Maria, are trying to construct a personal fairy story out of this enterprise (implied at more than one juncture in the film), they are intent upon building something that will endure conditions that, as we see from the onset, are frequently harsh.  The setting (in the north of Iceland, an hour’s drive outside Akureyri) is magnificent, a green isle resting beneath a range of mountains chiseled by millennia of ice and rain and fed by a river running to one side of its valley.  The mountains, not approaching the alpine heights of European ranges, seem daunting nevertheless; undeniably beautiful, but also impassive, a deadweight to their backs.

The sheep-tending and shepherding are the most hands-on chores—both physically and emotionally demanding.  They approach these tasks sensitively—up to a point. We can see them taking shared pleasure in mid-wifing the births among their flock; then only days thereafter tagging them, a procedure that might be expected to draw blood—and does. (Maria cuts one new lamb’s ear at one point, soothing it perfunctorily, as if to say, ‘there, there now … get over it’.)  There are ‘easy’ and not-so-easy births.  The uncertainty we read into the sheep’s ‘everyday’ behavior is magnified in the ewes’ somewhat variable gestations—which may be further magnified by a natural tendency to anthropomorphize. This inclination puts the viewer in almost perfect synch with the characters, who occasionally seem slightly off-kilter with their gestating ewes.  (Icelandic sheep are in fact considered unusually intelligent; cognizant of their captivity and the impulse to escape.)

But we sense that Maria and Ingvar are fenced in here, too; locked into rhythms and measures of time and duration dictated by the life cycles of their crops and sheep; enveloped in the vast expanse of the near-wild terrain swallowing up their farm.  We see them early in the film speculating about notions of time travel, triggered by a journal article Ingvar is reading.  Ingvar remarks that he’s not in a particular hurry to see the future.  Maria responds that travel into the past might also be possible under such theoretical terms.

In the ensuing scenes and ‘chapters’ of the film, the past in its prismatic dissolve of pagan mythology, the archetypal imagery of fairy tale and folklore, the tattered remains of personal nostalgia, and legacies of cataclysmic violence (voluntary and involuntary—call it ‘the human stain’, if you will) essentially catches up with a future no one can see coming, much less prepare for.

Without apologizing for ‘spoilers’ (I have to assume the essential parts of the film story will be well-known before this is published), the ‘rough beast’ is delivered—and removed from her ‘manger’—also, more importantly, her mother.  The transition is shockingly swift.  Maria all but shuts down discussion of her adoption/appropriation, leaving Ingvar wracked with what we read as commingled guilt, doubt, alienation, anguish and anxiety.  It’s effectively a second boundary violation and a personal betrayal of almost biblical scope.  But caught up in the film’s ‘fairy tale’ as much as the film’s characters—and with a similar emotional investment—we don’t immediately read these violations with such certainty for the simple reason that our attention and concern begin to center on the child.

Notwithstanding their vigilance, there are scares (which might also be read as ‘warning signs’) early in their appropriated parenthood.  Not even a toddler, the child goes missing early one morning, only to be found at what seems the last possible moment at the river’s edge, with no explanation as to how she got there.  In the meantime, the mother ewe refuses to surrender custody and makes her determined way to the farmhouse windows in which the child, or at least her crib, is easily seen.  Maria’s glare warns her off, but the ewe does not relent, staking out a place to keep her vigil some distance from the house, but squarely in her sightlines.

The scenario is complicated by the unexpected arrival of Ingvar’s brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), a moody, itinerant ex-rocker abandoned by a trio of fellow travelers, who may be as exasperated by him as the isolated terrain he’s led them into.  He is welcomed warmly at first—perhaps not least for his availability to assist in the farm’s unrelenting stream of tasks—and is introduced in due course to the child.  His immediate reaction is an unmediated counterpart to his brother’s now suppressed anguish, and heedless of boundaries urges swift dispatch to an unarticulated but presumably violent fate.  Ingvar tamps down the discussion with a resigned shrug and seeming plea for communal peace:  “It’s her [Maria’s] happiness.”  In the domestic cocoon Ingvar and Maria have built for themselves, the silences count for more than words.

Then against all odds, Pétur is himself ‘domesticated’, almost ‘redeemed’ in a sequence that takes him (and the audience) to the edge—leading the toddler out to the meadows before dawn and pointing a shotgun straight at her head.  Maria eventually awakens to see that both are missing; then, in her mounting hysteria and ready to make her way out of the house, she comes across them both asleep in a chair, the child nestled sweetly in Pétur’s arms.

At no point in the film is the viewer not made to feel trepidatious about the child and acutely anxious about her fate.  It might almost be appropriate to refer to the character, as ‘the Child’, given her centrality to the film and the almost messianic burden she bears across the spectrum of themes the film taps into.  One of those themes (inevitably) is the concept of the Child itself—as distinguished from ‘offspring’, ‘pups’, and the like—one more way in which we set ourselves apart from (and above) other animals.

The film’s place in this larger discussion almost merits a separate essay, but I’ll try to sum up a few of the points emphasized here.  The most obvious and concrete consequence here, underscored by the film’s setting—parental expectations of a child’s participation in and inheritance of their material legacy—isn’t touched upon because of this particular child’s hybrid fairy/freak place in the tale.  But then there are more fraught issues of the parents’ unarticulated expectations—or simply hopes, conscious and unconscious aspirations:  the imposition of their own unperformed or unachieved dreams, ambitions, aspirations; desires to extend or expand their legacies; or to carry their communities’ legacies to another level—to carry a standard forward.  Or—perhaps especially, inevitably emphasized in the instance of the unique or unusual child—a latent, unconscious ambition to definitively shift the paradigm, re-shape the world.  Or—taking it to the messianic level—to ‘Save the World’.  (Whatever we mean by that—but it usually has something to do with removing the ‘human stain’.)

But the most generous and encompassing aspect of the child’s symbolic power is simply its embodiment of generational renewal, reimagination, the possibility of fresh dreams and (that most ephemeral of conditions) happiness, and finally hope.  Lamb will not leave the viewer in this state.  It is unremittingly bleak.  But, as I considered the impossible place this Child held both narratively and symbolically in Johannsson’s film, I was reminded of the penultimate scene from a Gore Vidal novel which also comes to an apocalyptic climax (Kalki, 1978).  The chapter is written in the voice of Teddy Ottinger, a former test pilot who effectively helps bring about the novel’s apocalyptic dénouement.  In the course of a ‘post-apocalypse’ reconnaissance mission, she and her partner impulsively rescue two chimps and bring them back to the planet’s remaining island of civilization (Washington, D.C.—Vidal never skimped on ironies), where they live out (comfortably—at the Hay-Adams Hotel) humankind’s effective demise.

“This afternoon, sitting on that log beside the river, with Eve snuggled in my lap, I was surprisingly happy.  Small things give great pleasure now.  Let me list today’s delights.  Apple-scented air.  Bright red birds on the wing.  Silver fish that briefly arc above the surface of a river which glitters in the sun like a silver fish’s scales.  The cold clear clean water of the river that makes no sound as it slides past me to the sea.  The Child.”

Few such delights await the characters here.  Legacies are evoked and traditions to be carried forward.  Ingvar recites fairy tales to his adopted Ada (e.g., Dimmalimm, the story of a princess locked in a castle by an evil guardian, Turannos, to be rescued by a prince changed by Turannos’ own spell into a swan.)  Pétur recites poetry to Ada on a boating excursion (the viewer half-anticipating murderous disaster with every stroke and strophe), lamenting that (given her sheep’s head) she will never be able to recite it.  Ingvar discovers an old VHS tape of one of Pétur’s band’s performances, and the three humans merrily dance to it—as Ada watches with curiosity—and ever increasing self-consciousness of her difference.  (Wandering off from her dancing adoptive family, she gazes at her reflection in a mirror, then at a painting of a flock of sheep—her abandoned tribe.)

Here, the spell we have been joined to—the cocoon within and the terror without, Maria’s willful enchantment and murderous rage—is effectively broken, Ada’s reflections (her first in the river) come full circle.  Johannsson makes a kind of narrative ‘dissolve’ of this—the reverse of the old movie trick where the pictorialized miniature or framed memento out of some past gives way to the live-action contemporary.  The ‘reality’ in Ingvar and Maria’s farmhouse collapses into a kind of nostalgic blur; and we’re not particularly surprised when Pétur attempts to take advantage of the situation (as Ingvar, surrendering to fatigue, turns in for a nap) by forcing himself on Maria for a second time.  Ada is displaced here in fairly literal terms:  her identity, her place in this familial community, her own ‘happiness’—which she can scarcely conceive—all thrown into suspense.

The film’s palette (indigo shadows eliding to pale gray-blues, desert-pale beiges, and slate gray skies—in which bright blues and greens fairly pop) and stolidly utilitarian domestic architecture evince both a kind of resistance and reticence; less an acquiescence to the natural order than a tentative, provisional peace with it.  (The lighting and photography of this saga—by Eli Arensen—are nothing short of miraculous; the editing is by Agnieszka Glinska.)  Maria’s characteristic expression (brilliantly articulated by Noomi Rapace) here seems to convey a no-nonsense, no ‘wishful thinking going on here’ attitude.  Yet there is—and it’s her own.  Loss is at the emotional core of this, but it can’t rationalize her taking—her transgressive, violent appropriation; moreover, the claim she imposes upon the Child.

It’s not surprising that we chafe at identity politics in recent years.  It’s a legacy carried over and corrupted by millennia of aggression, violation, cultural and political hierarchies that should have little or no bearing on individuals perceived or presumed to be in their sphere of influence.  In vivid contrast with the Lamb, which, aside from snakes, rats, pigeons and guinea pigs, must be one of the most put-upon species humans ever set their predatory eyes on, the human child occupies an ambiguous utopian limbo at the center of these hierarchies.  We invest so much—materially and psychically—in the child, yet (setting aside nonsensical claims for the ‘pre-born’, as some of their would-be ‘advocates’ classify them), s/he is no less subject to parental, community and cultural hierarchies imposed by the circumstances of birth; and there are risks for the child who grows up to challenge any of them.

Johannsson’s film lingers but doesn’t dwell on these issues, letting the film move to its vortex—which can be summed up as a taking that responds to a taking.  Up or down the ‘food chain’, a usurpation of any kind is likely to be met by the most severe penalty or sanction.  In this regard, the film is very much of the moment—inviting the viewer to consider the apocalyptic consequences of our millennia of taking without compensation.  (If one were inclined to make light of it, the ending might be summarized as ‘a preview of coming attractions.’)

Not until half-way through the film do we grasp the losses behind Maria’s willful breach.  (The half-human Ada has been preceded by a few fully human Adas, presumably lost in early infancy or by stillbirth.)  But there is also something here about the way we memorialize and invest emotionally in loss—which prompts further question as to the meaning of loss, and the valuation we place on lived experience—our own and others’.  (And it’s not as if Maria and Ingvar stop having sex.)  Non-human (and for that matter human) animals down the food chain are rarely accommodated similarly.  Lamb challenges the viewer to consider the notion of happiness itself—the ‘pursuit’ of which has always assumed a rapaciously materialistic character in the West and through most of the civilized world.  Happiness may take hold of us at one point or another (if we’re lucky), but is never held indefinitely.  The characters here—particularly Maria—pursue something that can never be held without terrible cost.  They invest in utopian fantasies when the likely prospect is hell.  Carrying those utopian terms to their logical conclusion, Johannsson’s film takes us still further—toward a place of existential abandonment.  In single-minded pursuit of her happiness, Maria has surrendered hope.  It is a desperately lonely place.