[Review] Lamb (2021) Nature and Cruelty in Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Bleak New Fairy Tale

A Gentle Warning: If graphic depictions of animal cruelty are difficult for you to watch, avoid this film and protect your heart. Part of me wishes I had. Light spoilers below.

When I was young, my mother introduced me to a very special book called The Fairy Tale Tree. Ever since receiving it as a child from her aunt Civia, she’s considered this book to be one of her most prized possessions. With a wealth of beautiful stories from all over the world, it was like holding magic in our hands when we read from it together.

While the two of us loved each story in the book more than the next, we found ourselves often lingering on a certain one. Later adapted into the film Otesánek (2000), “The Hungry Little Chip,” as it was known to us, is a Czech fairy tale about a couple struggling to conceive a child. The story goes that one day while roaming the forest, the husband discovers a curiously human-like plank of wood. He and his wife, in their despair, treat this “Little Chip” as they would a baby, eventually inspiring him to spring to life. While written in a lighthearted and comical tone, this story is actually a very harrowing cautionary tale. Little Chip, whose hunger becomes dangerously insatiable after his animation, ends up eating multiple residents of the village, including his new mother and father. In the end, he’s murdered by one of the townspeople, causing him to regurgitate all of the villagers he’d eaten (including a shepherd and his sheep). But while everyone somehow survives this ordeal—and bizarrely remains in one piece—it’s still quite a disturbing story when I think back on it.

Before going into Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb (2021), I speculated tirelessly on what the film would entail. I’d guessed that it would revolve much less around the little lamb and much more around the catastrophic downfalls of the human condition (in a similar vein to “Little Chip).”As a diehard animal lover and fur mama of four, the film had been calling my name since the news of it first surfaced. After seeing the tense but adorable trailer—set to The Beach Boys singing, “God only knows what I’d be without…” EWE—I was simply beguiled, every fiber of my being obsessed with this lamb-child-hybrid, and finding excuses to talk about her every chance I could get. I mean, look at her little coat. I rarely miss films about anthropomorphic animals anyway (being that they’re my favorite genre and all), but this mysterious gem seemed to be in a league of its own (and it was).

María and Ada (in her little coat) in an idyllic field of flowers.

The haunting new A24 film focuses on María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), two sheep farmers grieving the tragic loss of their child. After making a strange discovery one day while assisting in (for lack of better words) the birthing process of one of their ewes, the couple become parents again...though in a completely different way than they could have expected. By some stroke of magic, certainly not luck, Ada enters their lives: an angelic lamb with the body (aside from one hoof) of a human baby.

Although shocked at first by the infant’s curious qualities, María and Ingvar warm up to the little one quickly, deciding to take her in and raise her as their own. But this is exactly where the two go wrong. Ada, the only animal in the film called by name, was not the farmers’ child to raise. With echoes of “The Hungry Little Chip,” this film is a fairy tale all on its own exploring the depths of human cruelty and the self-centered wedge we drive so often between ourselves and other animals.

Ada watching her parents from the mirror, an image that speaks to the continuous barrier between them.

The film is beautiful in its rawness, decadent landscapes, dreamy cinematography, flawless special effects, cerebral score, and alluring soundtrack (including a scene with a music video that I’m madly in love with). But to be honest, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to watch Lamb in full again. Early in the film, Ingvar’s brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) asks the new father, what on Earth is going on here? Ingvar simply answers, “Happiness.” Jóhannsson’s Lamb is a horror film (a monster film, really) about humanness, selfishness, and what it means when our personal happiness is derived from another’s pain. With the ruthless violence perpetuated by every human lead and the perpetual heartrending tension throughout, the film ripped my heart into shreds while I watched, leaving me sick to my stomach even hours after leaving the theater. The brutality enacted by the “protagonists” was so terribly senseless, but I’m pretty sure that was the point.

In Lamb’s last act, the couple’s lives finally fall to pieces, illuminating within me a disquieting relief that speaks to my callousness. María and Ingvar, eyes clouded with loss, interfered virulently with nature, ultimately paying their debt back with blood. In the end, nature restores its own loss, but the film begs the question: if Ada were born with no human resemblance, would the two still extend her their kindness? When we hurt, does it give us the right to hurt others? No, but as hard as I strive to live kindly and warmly, I’ve been clouded by loss before, too. Haven’t we all?