Review: Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb Is a Killer Punchline in Search of a Joke

Shortly after Norm Macdonald’s death, a 2009 clip of the comedian telling his “moth joke” on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien went viral. A rambling shaggy-dog story about a moth pouring forth its troubles to a podiatrist, the joke accumulates a kind of giddy anxiety in the listener as Macdonald stretches this thin premise well past the point of decorum for a late-night talk show, loading on more and more existentialist misery before, finally, getting to the hilariously anticlimactic punchline. Why is this moth telling all this to a podiatrist rather than a psychiatrist? Because the light was on.

Lamb plays a bit like a feature-length version of Macdonald’s gag, stretching its absurd premise as far as it can possibly go before blowing the whole thing up in a final moment of winking mischief. Valdimar Jóhannsson’s film centers on an adorable half-human, half-lamb hybrid born on a remote Icelandic farm whose proprietors, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), decide to raise the creature as if it were their own child. The baby, which they’ve dubbed Ada—the same name, not incidentally, as their previously deceased daughter—is doted on by her adoptive parents, who treat her as a kind of divine salvation from trauma. “Ada is a gift,” Maria at one point says, “a new beginning.”

Lamb gains much of its oddball energy from the preposterous cuteness of its central image. The titular creature, a mostly seamless combination of child actors, puppetry, real animals, and CGI, is at once adorable, amusing, and oddly unsettling, the physical embodiment of humans’ tendency to anthropomorphize animals. Much of the film consists of relatively mundane depictions of rural domesticity, which are given just the slightest frisson of surrealism by the presence of a chimeric critter dressed in the cutesy wardrobe of a human toddler. In certain passages, Lamb plays as a satire on childless millennial couples’ propensity to dote on their “fur babies” as if they were their actual offspring.

Unfortunately, Lamb’s novel premise only goes so far, and after a certain point, the film’s quietly deadpan minutiae simply becomes tedious. This is largely due to the sameyness of Jóhannsson’s visual style. The film opens with a portentous tracking shot of horses ensconced in a deep fog, which recalls the work of Béla Tarr (who’s credited on the film as an executive producer). But after this, Jóhannsson settles into a mode of picturesque understatement reminiscent of fellow Icelander Grímur Hákonarson’s pastoral comedy Rams. Like Hákonarson, Jóhannsson emphasizes the almost unearthly beauty of rural Iceland, but there’s a superficiality to this approach, as if the filmmaker were trying to use his picture-postcard imagery to paper over the film’s fundamental lack of ideas, drama, tension, or mystery.

Lamb assembles a grab bag of themes—grief, domestic strife, sibling rivalry, parental overreach, and more—but the only one that receives more than a passing nod is the idea that Maria and Ingvar’s adoption of Ada isn’t really so innocent. This is signaled early on in scenes of the couple going about the chores of the farm, treating their herd of sheep not like treasured children but as the livestock that they are. Only Ada, a lamb that just so happens to have some human limbs, is treated as something special. Jóhannsson subtly points up Maria and Ingvar’s hypocrisy with a number of subtle visual gags—such as the couple enjoying a Christmas lamb dinner and dressing Ada in wool sweaters woven from the coats of her sheep brethren—as well as some not-so-subtle narrative beats involving the ewe that birthed Ada.

The film pads out its runtime with a visit from Ingvar’s brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), a recovering addict who’s at first confounded by Maria and Ingvar’s inter-species adoptee before happily embracing the role of doting uncle. Pétur’s rapid change of heart subverts our expectations but also leaves the character with little to do. A subplot involving Pétur’s infatuation with Maria goes nowhere fast and highlights the fact that Jóhannsson, having contrived a singularly captivating central image, don’t really have much to say about it.

Lamb climaxes with a moment of unexpectedly violent retribution, disrupting the film’s pervasive mood of dull complacency in entertainingly gonzo fashion. But its absurdist effect dissipates surprisingly quickly. This prankish, apocalyptic ending may induce a shocked laugh in the viewer, but it can’t quite make up for the protracted monotony of the rest of the film. Jóhannsson and co-screenwriter Sjón have given Lamb a decent punchline, but given the noncommittal and mostly uninteresting road getting there, it’s hard to see the point of it all.