106 min | R | October 8, 2021 | A24
A childless couple on a remote Icelandic farm finds a newborn that is half lamb and half human. They name her, dress her, and raise her as their daughter. Nature notices, and nature wants its child back.
María and Ingvar run a sheep farm in a remote Icelandic valley. They work in near silence, and their marriage carries the weight of a loss they never speak aloud. One night a ewe delivers something that is part lamb and part child. They carry it inside, name her Ada, and raise her as their daughter. The film is a folk fable about grief and the things people take to fill an absence. It is about a couple who steal a happiness they did not earn and refuse to ask what it will cost.
Noomi Rapace plays María with a stillness that hides ferocity. She tends Ada with a tenderness that curdles into possession. Rapace lets you see the calculation behind the maternal warmth. Hilmir Snær Guðnason plays Ingvar as a gentler accomplice, a man who accepts the impossible because his wife needs it to be true. Björn Hlynur Haraldsson plays Pétur, Ingvar’s brother, who arrives as the outsider voice asking the question the couple will not. His disgust gives way to complicity, and Haraldsson charts that drift without a word of explanation.
Valdimar Jóhannsson directs his first feature with the patience of someone who trusts a landscape to do the work. He and his co-writer Sjón withhold the sight of Ada for as long as possible, framing her below the edge of the table or just outside the lens. The camera sits in the fog-choked valley and lets the mountains press down on the farmhouse. The sound design carries the film. Wind, bleating sheep, and the heavy breathing of an unseen presence build a dread that the images keep calm. The editing favors long held takes that force you to wait, and the waiting is the point.
Lamb commits to its premise with a straight face, and the deadpan is its best joke and its real horror. The film treats an absurd image as domestic routine, and that refusal to wink is what makes it unsettling. The patience that builds the spell also thins the payoff. The ending arrives with the logic of a fable but lands lighter than the buildup promises. What stays is the picture of two people who took something that was never theirs. The film knows that nature keeps its own accounts.