Review: LAMB

A young farming couple are kept busy during lambing season, seeing to the safe delivery of the new breed when one of the births stops them dead. We don't see what it is. The lamb fresh from its mother seems normal but the pair are spooked by it. The woman wraps the animal in swaddling and takes her to the house. Before anyone knows it man, woman and lamb are now a family. We don't quite know if we are seeing this as they are but when ne'erdowell brother Petur visits from the city he doesn't. He demands to know what the situation is and is told by his  brother that it's happiness.

This film is not difficult to describe as much as its description beyond this point would spoil not only plot points but the direction that this strange fable of grief and longing takes to full tell its singular tale. I can spoil this much: if you are the kind of movie viewer who tells you why certain acts on screen couldn't happen you will not be able to watch this film quietly and so should either see it by yourself or never see it. If, on the other hand, you are blessed with an imagination that maturity has not battered you might well be delighted and intrigued by it.

Noomi Rapace, who broke through in the original film of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and has since been in high profile work around the globe, will go to the extent of learning a language for a role. She learned English for Prometheus (so, something good did come out of that mess). Here she teeters so convincingly between hard rationality and the scary seriousness of the insane that she sometimes appears to shimmer from both. While I didn't really believe that Christopher Reeve could fly but put up with some good effects, I had no trouble believing that Rapace's Maria believes.

The vistas of the rolling green hills and distant primeval mountains and the sounds of isolation bear down upon us and a score so spare it's hardly audible bid us into a weird Eden. Rapace co-produced with the great Bela Tarr. Between her clear drive to tell this magical realist folksong and Tarr's legendary light touch on the accelerator and his openness to find the wonderful in the mud of the day have fashioned something closer to itself than any comparable film. There won't be an American remake of this but if there were (and it wasn't a goofy comedy) there would be a mounting clash between her love of the lamb Ada and the stiff authority of the greater society. You watch this and know that such a thought never occured to these people. Because of that and like Stalker, Eraserhead or The Werckmeister Harmonies when you see this the only things like it will be copies.