Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Valdimar Jóhannsson's Lamb is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries starting February 25, 2022 in the series Debuts.
“What the fuck is this?” “Happiness.” This exchange occurs halfway in Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature, Lamb, a cautionary tale about familial integrity but one that if fuelled by the insatiable, all-too-human desire for togetherness. The happiness in question is embodied by a family of three: Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), Maria (Noomi Rapace), and their adopted daughter Ada, whose origin prompts the bemused question to begin with. But with Lamb, Jóhannsson and his co-writer Sjón prefer to interrogate repercussions instead of genesis.
The film’s opening shot is shrouded in mystique, as a herd of wild horses turn back from their path amidst a snow storm, while its hiss drenches the whole scene in ambiguity and dread. Inside a barn, not too far away, sheep are equally restless. Amidst bell chimes, a radio voice buzzes: “Merry Christmas,” as a pregnant ewe collapses in the doorway: could it be that another savior is born?
From the outset, the couple in charge of the farm seem to be in no need of salvation. Maria and Ingvar share a life of equanimity and quietude, to the point in which the latter renders their verbal interactions redundant. Lamb may be a taciturn film but it’s certainly not silent. Laced within Þórarinn Guðnason’s ethereal score, rich with velvety reverbs, is a symphony of nonhuman sounds: bleating, barking, stomping, tapping, clanking, and an endurant tractor rumble. Yet, the first line of (human) dialogue in the film concerns time travel and how it was, already, theoretically possible. Nonchalantly, their tone masks a gaping wound, one which, instead of being named accordingly, will manifest itself through fragments: an empty cot, a small wooden cross perched in a makeshift graveyard nearby. Both the tragedy and the redemption of Lamb are told through sustained, imaginatively crafted absences.
To signify these omissions, the precise camerawork of Eli Arenson often locks the protagonists’ faces in a tight clench, but separately. Instead of scrutinizing their physiognomy in order to make up for the little dialogue exchanged, such closeness calls at their backstory to resurface. Maria and Ingvar, whether framed separately or together, have their gazes fixed on the off-screen space—their altruistic personalities and how they direct themselves towards the other. Whether it’s Ingvar’s solitary cry as seen through the tractor’s front window, or the determination with which Maria points a gun to protect the family, both are singled out as standalone instances of grief, their shareability cut by the film’s rhythmic editing. The longer one spends exploring a face or a body, the harsher the cut feels in its arrival.
One of the few places where Maria and Ingvar share the same cinematic space is the barn. In a documentary fashion, Lamb familiarizes its viewers with lamb birth (twice), paying close attention to the newborns, all covered in blood and mucus. One day, as Maria delivers a newborn, the camera stays with her shock, cutting off both the mother and the baby from the frame. Just how incredulous this just-born creature is, we don’t get to know yet. However, even stylistically, its birth seems like a non sequitur, a shift in the narrative, a miracle. From that moment on, the family circle is complete: Maria and Ingvar inhabit the same frame more often, restoring a long-lost intimacy with the help of a new member, an extraordinary child.
Once again, an absence has been fleshed out, this time around by the help of a surrogate: we witness how the signifiers of a human baby are transposed onto the newborn—a cot, a blanket, a baby bottle of milk—as the intermingling of species is made apparent by such minute details. One can easily notice the tangible sense of loss, inscribed in the measured way Noomi Rapace inhabits her Maria. Earnest, with a glow of confidence but rarely smiling, the human mother performs gestures that are well-known, but well-forgotten to her. In the tenderness with which she holds the child, there are multiple instances of Rapace’s finely-tuned performance of subtle self-assurance.
Indeed, the film introduces Ada firstly through her human parents’ behavior but without diminishing the crucial role she will play. The decision to show that the baby is, in fact, a lamb-faced, human-bodied hybrid, only after fleshing out a sustained family world, where origins and species are unquestionable, presents Lamb as a film attentive to both humans and animals in equal measure. Mythology and religion harbor numerous examples of theriocephaly (literally, “animal headedness”), from the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis to the Minotaur, a hybrid offspring of a bull and a queen. This particular type of animal hybrids are not shielded by an anthropoid face that is thought as a common denominator of both humanity and empathy, and as a result, they are often pictured as monsters. Appearing in genre films such as the 1932 cult classic Island of Lost Souls, the 1973 American horror Sssssss,or Jonathan King’s Sheep (2006), the monstrous is usually a product of genetic experiments, a suspicion which taps into the terror of science, not unlike its contemporary counterpart, the recent Netflix series, Sweet Tooth.
Most importantly, Ada is no monster. Far off is the demon-child trope, even farther away, the secular fear of purposeful bioengineering. Instead, the lamb-child dazzles with her shy curiosity, wearing knitwear and dungarees, pointing at objects with a right hoof, and holding onto the parents with a left hand. Part of the appeal is owed to the fact that the viewer cannot see Ada as Maria and Ingvar see her—as an incarnation of the daughter of the same name they’d lost. Unlike them, the audience is left to wonder about the baby’s origins, its unconventional hybridity, and to grapple with ambivalent feelings oscillating between endearment and perplexity, a combination of which produces a self-perpetuating dynamic of distance and proximity to her. The hypnotic charm of Ada is inescapable, as a newcomer will soon learn. Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), Ingvar’s brother and supposed ex-lover of Maria, arrives at the farm unannounced and does not hide his true conviction about the family situation: “You guys are acting childish, playing house with that animal,” he says. Even as his confusion grows violent and the suspicion calls him to take action and try to eliminate the child, a rapid cut shows him cuddling the hybrid baby and nursing a warm relationship with his newfound niece.
It’s the cuteness factor in the depiction of Ada which underscores the destabilization of her hybridity. Hybrid embodiment, in contrast with normative embodiment, gestures towards a social identity, rather than an individual autonomous selfhood. Ada, being half-lamb, half human child, personifies multiple instances of symbolism, national identification, myth, and nostalgia, all bundled up together into an admirably cuddlesome reminder of trauma. Without a word—since Jóhannsson decided against a talking Ada in the final cut—the character’s opacity seems in part responsible for the film’s ethical standpoint.
Lamb displaces the human-animal hybrid from the monstrous and the carnivalesque and situates it in the quiet of the Anthropocene. Amidst the sparsely populated fields outside of Akureyri, North Iceland, the nuclear family may easily be the last one left on Earth, or the first. In both ways, the film’s aesthetics suggest a certain degree of utopianism. The singular farm is, after all, tucked away in a valley which itself resembles a womb nested between mountains, the mythopoetic qualities of the scenic setting are made palpable in recurring, dream-like long shots.
Without a precise referent in Icelandic folklore—the film’s co-writer, Sjón, is an acclaimed author who works across genres and literary forms—Ada’s hybridity bears traces in the legends of fylgjur, or personal spirits, often in the shape of an animal, or in-between human and animal. Combining some remnants of pagan totemism, alongside the Christian symbolism, the figure of Ada can be charted across centuries of Nordic history. At the same time, the fact that Ada becomes the surrogate daughter the couple has lost, reminds one of the quid pro quo logic of another Norse legend, that of the changelings, or oafs, that took the place of abducted human babies. In any way, the borders of the natural world (or the natural order) have to be policed, and such folk tales provide metaphoric instances for the same purpose. Entrenched in the happiness of a complete, nuclear family, Maria rejects the law of nature in a literal and most importantly, violent way, which will, in its turn, beget more violence.
Ada’s hybridity seems uncanny because it reminds us of metamorphosis, but stopped in its tracks. An ossified state of being conditions the body in question for political inscriptions: the lamb baby can be an advocate for animal rights, for crip feminism, for posthumanism, or maybe even antinatalism. In any case, the ambiguity of her character owes much to the seamless way the creature is visualized, even if the production included a triple-take technique, reenacting each scene with a puppet, with a child, and then with a lamb. Ada brings Maria and Ingvar a much-desired wholeness, as much as Lamb opens up questions about the human to come, by questioning the heteronormative nuclear family and negating everything that’s sacred, or for that matter, animalistic, about it. What’s left is humanity laid bare.