Why “Lamb” Was Nominated for Best Picture Awards

I promise, this review is not going to be inundated with poultry puns. Besides, this is a very serious movie review blog, and filling it with puns is a waste of your time, and nobody’s goat time for that!

Show, don’t tell

Sorry. I couldn’t resist. I’ll stop kidding around. Sorry. Last one. If this whole review was just goat puns, it would be very, very baaaaad.

So Noomi Rapace, who’s an incredible actor, gets the chance to act her tail off in a film with little to no dialogue. I’ve talked about how cool it is and how creative directors have to get when they’re forced to tell a story without exposition. It’s such a crutch that poor, amateur directors have no choice but to word vomit what’s going on. In mysterious, complex films, films like The Watchers spell shit out because it couldn’t figure out how to tell us something more complicated than ‘people are in box’.

It takes both courage and creativity to show a story on film and keep the dialogue sparse, and relegated to only what’s most absolutely necessary. In turn, Rapace and her co-star, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, whose name cannot be pronounced, barely speak as the film sets up. Rather, the director manages to capture true character in their actions, body language, and the cinematography. Turns out, there’s a lot to be said between the words, even if you’re filming a story about, what amounts to, Icelanding hillbillies.

It’s very quickly clear to the audience that the two characters have a strained marriage, even if they never fight or snip at each other. You can just tell that something’s goatta have gone very wrong for their relationsheep to have become this way.  

Patience Rewarded

It’s certainly worth noting that the director must have had incredible patience to wait and film and capture the animals in this film in order to get the audience to project their emotions based on what’s going on in the film, and what the animals are doing. A lot of times, films focus on blank facial expressions of their actors, or emptier landscapes, in order to invoke the audience into filling the screen with their own thoughts and emotions. What they tend to forget is that an amount of legwork on the film’s part is necessary to conjure those feelings. You need a cause, a question, some sort of catalyst, in order for that type of technique to work. And the film Lamb does that very well. The empty spaces and moments are inviting and deliberate, and help fill the story out, and I think that that’s a big reason why the film was nominated for so many awards.

Now. Is the movie really worth ‘best picture’? Can the film’s intentional emptiness overcome the ambiguity and the literal kid-napping vagueness? I don’t know. That’s art, I guess. Don’t goat me wrong, the movie is, undoubtedly, great. But it’s also boring. Just marginally more active than Skinamarink. Ewe-d have a hard time keeping your phone in your pocket, y’know?

The last thing I wanted to address about the film was that you may find that the film is billed as a ‘horror’ in some places. It’s not really. You’re never going to be frightened. A bit tense, sure, but there’s nothing truly scary. No jump scares, no running around in the dark with flashlights, none of that. Yes, the film has allegories to the antichrist, but nothing overt, and definitely nothing purely defined. Even the ending is open-ended. It’s creepy at best, shleepy at worst.

I want to say that this movie is YMMV, but because of one, ten second long scene of Rapace’s boobies, it’s getting bumped to

GOOD

I caught this movie on Tubi, but it is lambspiring soon.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!