‘Lamb’: Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Tense, High-Concept Drama Offers Few Surprises [Cannes Review]

The first trailer for Lamb has finally debuted.

Lamb, a new horror film from A24 starring Noomi Rapace, has just been released – check it out below.The film stars Rapace alongside Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, in the directorial debut from Valdimar Jóhannsson.An official synopsis for Lamb from A24 reads: “A childless couple (Rapace and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) in rural Iceland make an alarming discovery one day in their sheep barn.“They soon face the consequences of defying the will of nature, in this dark and atmospheric folktale, the striking debut

An odd couple is at odds with nature in A24’s new trailer for Valdimar Jóhannsson’s “Lamb”.

The Cannes Film Festival is only about two weeks old now, and one of the highlights, it seems, was “Lamb,” a dark, atmospheric, eerie-looking folktale from first-time Iceland director Valdimar Jóhannsson. Starring Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, depending on who you ask and “Lamb” is a supernatural drama, a biblical film, a low-key horror or something else.

Ethan Shanfeld Things get wild in the trailer for A24’s “Lamb,” premiering in theaters on Oct. 8.Starring Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson and Ingvar Sigurðsson, the film follows a childless couple in rural Iceland who makes an alarming discovery in their sheep barn.

Jessica Kiang Splicing the dark heart of a folk-horror movie into the fluffy body of a rural Icelandic relationship drama yields unexpectedly fertile and darkly comic effects in Valdimir Jóhannsson’s creepy-funny-weird-sad “Lamb,” a film that proves just how far disbelief can be suspended if you’re in the hands of a director — and a cast, and an SFX/puppetry department — who really commit to the bit.

Note to self: do not get old. The alternative, i.e., death, may not be very pleasant but, sedate and dignified and swathed in vaguely biblical white sheets, it doesn’t get anything like the bad press that old age does in Gaspar Noé‘s “Vortex.” Let’s not forget that in “Enter the Void,” this same director made death seem like quite the trip – infinitely preferable to the progressively demeaning ravages of dementia or the Sword of Damocles that is a dodgy ticker.

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

It’s rare for the last ten minutes of a film to radically change your opinion of the movie at large, let alone your entire viewing experience, but in “Hold Me Tight” (“Serre-Moi fort”), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, director Mathieu Amalric does precisely that.

It’s a good thing you can’t catch a virus from an image because if you could, just a few frames of Kirill Serebrennikov‘s fabulously yeasty, bilious, dank Competition title, “Petrov’s Flu” would bring all of Cannes‘ anti-Covid measures to naught.

A man asks the first woman who enters the room to marry him and then is surprised to find she does not respect him. This sums up “The Story of My Wife” from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, playing in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.

Tatiana Huezo’s eye for lyrical truth has materialized in documentaries like “Tempestad” or “The Tinniest Place,” works that penetrate some of the most tenebrous corners in recent Latin American history with shimmering compassion. Her stance as an acute observer of the people that survive and persevere through tumultuous sociopolitical and economically disadvantaged contexts produces thought-provoking filmic meditations.

In one scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria,” Jessica (Tilda Swinton) and a friend browse refrigerated cabinets designed to preserve flowers. “In here, time stops,” the saleswoman says proudly, gesturing at the blue cupboards.

A coming-of-age summer romance yarn, “Mi Iubita, Mon Amour” succeeds in shifting the power dynamic within the classic genre archetype, albeit in a way that increases the creep factor.

What do we really know about children? Until the Renaissance, artists were still painting them as freakish shriveled adults. Only in the last century-ish did American society decide they probably should go to school instead of laboring all day in sweatshops.

We can all stop wishing it a long life: the new flesh is thriving, living rent-free in Julia Ducournau‘s fucked-up titanium brain, oozing from every frame of her bizarrely beautiful, emphatically queer sophomore film, and thence seeping in through your orifices, the better to colonize your most lurid, confusing nightmares, as well as that certain class of sex dream that you’d be best off never confessing to having.

Of the many films playing at Cannes which have gained in resonance since the coming of the pandemic, “Zero F*cks Given” from French duo Julie Lecoustre, and Emmanuel Marre does not represent the creepiest, most alarming kind of coincidence — that description would better fit “Benedetta” from Dutch master Paul Verhoeven, which features an actual plague, face coverings and quarantine measures.

One should perhaps not read too much into the fact that the press screening of Kornel Mundruczó‘s “Evolution” was timed to coincide with the final of the UEFA European Football Championship.

Just a few days on the heels of “Stillwater,” another American entry in the Cannes Film Festival main competition section explores the complicated relationship between a father and daughter rooted in down-home Americana and close brushes with the law. “Flag Day” marks Sean Penn’s latest directorial return to Cannes since the critically-lambasted “The Last Face” from 2016.

Cinema’s love affair with trains goes back, of course, to the very origins of the art form, and more than a century later, the flame shows no sign of dimming. To recent examples such as “Snowpiercer” (2013), “Train to Busan” (2016), and the latest of many adaptations of “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017) can now be added “Compartment no.6” (“Hytti Nro 6”) from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, premiering in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes.