The Oth­er Lamb

When The Oth­er Lamb screened at the 2019 San Sebastián Film Fes­ti­val, there was a young woman who watched the whole film through the lens of her iPhone. She wasn’t record­ing, just post­ing stills dec­o­rat­ed with ​‘OMG’ and ​‘WOW’ on social media.

Nor­mal­ly you’d tap them on the shoul­der and polite­ly ask them to stop, but that’s rather futile when most of the audi­ence are also dip­ping their phones up and down to pho­to­graph the screen. The Oth­er Lamb is an Insta­gram sto­ry, a sequence of hotspot pho­to­shoots edit­ed into a bare­ly coher­ent stream of con­scious­ness. It is inter­minably banal.

Filmed on loca­tion in the Irish coun­try­side, the film’s land­scape shots are nice­ly cap­tured by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Michał Englert. They pro­vide some respite from the oth­er­wise nau­se­at­ing tur­bu­lence inflict­ed by the unsteady cam­era, now in low angle from the mud­dy grass, halfway up Michiel Huisman’s hairy nose. The Oth­er Lamb imme­di­ate­ly dis­plays a propen­si­ty for style over emo­tive sub­stance and empa­thet­ic characters.

That’s not to say there aren’t emo­tions on dis­play in The Oth­er Lamb – nary a scene goes by with­out some­one doing their best ban­shee-wail or show­ing off their abil­i­ty to bal­ance a sin­gle tear on their cheek. The female cult led by Huisman’s Christ-like patri­arch, lit­er­al­ly cred­it­ed as ​‘Shep­herd’, presents as an ama­teur the­atre group going wild in the woods, their bloody tantrums repeat­ed­ly cap­tured in slow-motion as if things need­ed drag­ging out any longer.

The entourage of new­com­ers are led by Raf­fey Cas­sidy as Selah, whose per­for­mance in Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer had seemed promis­ing for a career in hor­ror. Here she’s just beat­en around by Shep­herd, gagged and raped with­out any tan­gi­ble come­up­pance for the film not to feel misog­y­nis­tic itself.

It’s pos­si­ble direc­tor Mał­gorza­ta Szu­mows­ka felt she was giv­ing her female char­ac­ters real agency. Among the opaque cuts to float­ing cloths and a melt­ed Bar­bie doll we see Selah fan­ta­sise about killing Shep­herd. The Oth­er Lamb mis­takes the idea of rev­o­lu­tion for the action itself – the men­tal seed of rebel­lion is not strong enough in itself to over­come oppression.

There’s plen­ty of blood and guts – too much – with some stom­ach-churn­ing acts of ani­mal vio­lence. The film seems to be try­ing to say some­thing about the dan­gers of mak­ing men­stru­a­tion taboo, but in its exag­ger­at­ed point­ed­ness it only makes men­stru­al blood seem more macabre than it real­ly is. As Gre­ta Gerwig’s char­ac­ter shows in Mike Mills’ 20^th Cen­tu­ry Women, just talk­ing about it open­ly is enough.

There­in lies the great­est fault of The Oth­er Lamb – con­vinced it’s mak­ing a pro­found com­ment on patri­archy, it ends up say­ing noth­ing at all. To rev­el in themes of sex­u­al assault and incest plays to a misog­y­nis­tic form of nar­ra­tive plea­sure upon which hor­ror films thrive. Rather than cri­tiquing prac­tices it pur­ports to con­demn, The Oth­er Lamb becomes par­ty to the evils it depicts. Per­haps it’s for the best peo­ple at the screen­ing were too busy pho­tograph­ing the pret­ty land­scapes to take its mes­sage to heart.