The Other Lamb (2020)
Directed by Małgorzata Szumowska
For her entire life, the cult she was born into has been all that teenage Selah has known. Along with a band of similarly cloistered young women she lives seemingly unstuck in time, cut off from modern society in a remote forest commune presided over by a man called Shepherd, a controlling, messiah-like figure with a frightening dark side. But when her insular world is rocked by a series of nightmarish visions and disturbing revelations, Selah begins to question everything about her existence—including her allegiance to the increasingly dangerous Shepherd.
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Australian writer Catherine S McMullen’s screenplay featured on the 2017 Black List and Blood List, and seems to owe some debt of inspiration to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale .
The cult resides in a remote countryside location, and the depiction of the women’s everyday lives clearly takes inspiration from the world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
This fable provides another of the film’s unforgettable images, strongly reminiscent of the climax of Robert Eggers’ The Witch .
The Other Lamb recalls everything from The Witch and The Handmaid’s Tale to Rosemary’s Baby and Carrie.
In texture, the postured “Other Lamb” feels a lot like Robert Eggers’ 2015 Calvinist tale of the occult, “The Witch,” but at one point early on we get an incursion from the outside world and learn that we’re not toiling in a primitive, pre-electricity era.
However, Szumowska’s latest feature is utterly saturated with the bleak, eerie style of recent English-language art-horror, such that it feels closer to The Blackcoat’s Daughter , The Witch , and The Lodge than to anything else in the director’s filmography.
Through her own writing and directing as well as co-producing films such as Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), she is a clearly a filmmaker whose work is marked by a signature fearlessness.
Szumowska made a name for herself as a producer on Lars von Trier’s Antichrist , and there’s a bit of that provocation’s doom-and-gloom unreality in the painterly sprawl of the movie’s backwoods backdrop.
The relationship between these outsiders and the system is reminiscent of that explored by Debra Granik in the underrated Leave No Trace .
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As the omnipotent and apparently incredibly XX-slanted virile leader, Michiel Huisman (who was a cult victim in Karyn Kusama’s enjoyable The Invitation , 2015) looks the part but isn’t allowed much range beyond creepy lothario and abusive dominator—in short, he appears to be a man without a plan for such an otherwise efficient brainwashing operation, recruiting women in the same vein as the elitist collective in The Village (2004), seemingly.
His cult-friendly turn in Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation still fresh, Michiel Huisman is positively repulsive as Shepherd (he has another name but that is saved for a particularly delicious moment), an unsettling reminder of the older guy who would hang around the high school and comment on the “maturity” of the underage girls he preyed upon.
Selah (Raffey Cassidy, Killing of a Sacred Deer , Vox Lux) has never known any life except that of Eden, the commune where she lives with the sisters, the wives, and the Sheperd (Michiel Huisman, The Invitation ).
I’m thinking of The Invitation , another brilliant film with some terrific reveals, but The Other Lamb finds Huisman as the leader of a cult that feels not too different from what was seen in Martha Marcy May Marlene .
Huisman, who’s a skilled actor that’s given heft to a variety of smaller scale projects (if you haven’t seen “The Invitation” add it to your Netflix watchlist) he lacks the type of demeanor and towering presences required to sell his viciousness.
The Other Lamb casts Michiel Huisman (The Invitation solidifying his cultish bonafides) in the role of Shepherd, who rules over his harem like a god from on-high.
The cinematographer also utilizes graphic shots of mutilated animals that seem to offer up a parallel to the coming-of-age state of influx protagonist Selah (The Killing of a Sacred Deer‘s Raffey Cassidy, excelling here at growing her character with body language expressing her inner conflict) is going through.
If you saw her in “Vox Lux” or “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” you might recall her presence more than anything else, her watchful intelligence and eerie, preternatural calm.
Our focus is on teenage Selah (Raffey Cassidy from “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “Tomorrowland”), a teen whose mother died in childbirth.
Raffey Cassidy has been in some notable films lately such as “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “Vox Lux,” and here she’s allowed to show off a dark maturity.
Raffey Cassidy, young star of "Vox Lux" and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," delivers another knockout turn in this disturbing slice of allegorical folk horror, now on VOD.
Cassidy ( The Killing of a Sacred Deer , Vox Lux ) for her part strengthens her indie darling credentials, handling the disturbing psychosexual elements with impressive skill.