Photographed like a dream and experienced like a nightmare, the religious cult at the center of “The Other Lamb” looks idyllic on the outside, but, like the bird’s carcass stumbled upon by the film’s heroine, is teeming with maggots inside.
Most of this rot emanates from the leader, a Messiah-like figure known as the Shepherd and played by Michiel Huisman with arrogant stillness and burning glances. The recipient of these is usually Selah (Raffey Cassidy), an auburn-haired beauty and his favorite daughter. Over the years, the Shepherd, the lone male, has accumulated many wives and daughters — for all intents and purposes, seemingly one and the same — and Selah’s approaching puberty is about to catapult her from one nominal category to the other.
Her coming-of-age, though, brings visitations beyond the blood that will banish her temporarily to a shed reserved for the impure. Disturbingly macabre visions — a mauled lamb, livid crimson stripes on a woman’s neck — appear at random. Dark hints dropped by Sarah (Denise Gough), a mysteriously cursed wife fed on scraps and exiled to the fringes of the cult’s remote forest home, warn Selah that the Shepherd may not be the answer to her prayers. For one thing, he enjoys ramming his fingers down women’s throats in foreplay, but that’s another story — one that, like all the cult’s legends, only he is permitted to tell.
Existing outside of time and place, “The Other Lamb” is a gorgeous revenge fable with an excess of atmosphere and zero subtlety — a mallet wrapped in gauze and girlish laughter. As the women raise sheep and babble hysterically in prayer, the Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska uses her bucolic setting (the movie was filmed in Ireland) like a trap, a cage drenched in mist and primal ritual. The otherworldliness, as well as the potent blend of serenity and agitation in Michal Englert’s ecstatic cinematography, can be hyper-seductive; yet the lack of narrative or character depth in Catherine S. McMullen’s screenplay is frustrating. We learn what happens when a boy is born, or a wife gets too old to titillate; but the revelations — like the reasons for the cult’s endless trek to a new location — unfold with only the flimsiest of context and virtually no back story.
In only one brief sequence does the movie seem to reach for something transcendent, as Selah sees herself, in modern dress, drive unheedingly past the sect as it trudges beside a road. A vision of a new life, or a memory of a previous one, it frees the movie from its otherwise slow, symbol-fixated cycle of baptisms and beatings, obedience and control. In the press notes, Szumowska describes her film as “a dark cry against the patriarchy.” That seems to me like a very fair assessment.
The Other Lamb
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
