I Would Like to See It: The Other Lamb

Women in dresses of red and blue roughspun sing beneath branching webs of yarn drawn taut and interwoven. A painting of a long-haired man’s face stares Christ-like from the side panel of a rusted caravan. What are we to make of this pastoral cult, all slender women — all but one of whom are white — of varying ages, a flock divided into “wives” and their daughters by their small world’s central figure, the Shepherd (Michiel Huisman)? On the surface, evident brainwashing aside, the community seems as tight-knit and ovine as its name suggests, women and their daughters snuggled in communal beds, singing together at work, dining in harmony at a long trestle table. This veneer quickly begins to peel. All community is mediated through the person of the Shepherd, and the scarcity of his favor and attention provokes bitter competition among wives and daughters both. They inform on one another, harbor petty grudges, and despise themselves and one another in accordance with their patriarch’s extreme distaste for menstruation.

Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska finds her vein early on in the film, and once she taps its central thesis — that the lives and connections of women are filtered through the tempers of and utterly controlled by the most banal and insecure men imaginable — The Other Lamb bleeds freely for the rest of its brisk runtime. Huisman is wonderful here as the Shepherd, a tremendously charismatic man just smart enough to realize he’s surrounded by women cleverer than he is. His resentment is palpable, his juvenile games of splitting and isolating among both his wives and the daughters they’ve born him and who he now grooms as their replacements all too believably effective at destroying any hope of unity among them. The film’s exploration of the power of the unwanted woman as an archetypal figure is thoughtful and elegantly deployed, its depictions of feminine jealousy and competition viscerally uncomfortable, tinged with an infanticidal fervor brought to ghastly life in Selah’s (Raffey Cassidy) vision of a deformed newborn lamb.

One of the film’s most significant coups is Cassidy’s casting — you couldn’t find someone who looks more like Huisman’s daughter if you went hunting in his ballsack. Their close resemblance renders the film’s incestuous tensions tooth-grindingly real, and when their relationship finally begins to shake apart under the weight of his abuse and Selah’s maturation the violence both physical and emotional feels frightening and intimate, like something glimpsed as a child through a just-open door while visiting a friend’s house. But when the gore begins in earnest and the insular world of the cult finally erupts into chaos, the film manages to keep its head. There’s no sudden solution, no magical manifestation of a better worldview. Instead there are young women, orphaned and baptized in blood, standing before the empty throne of a dull-witted and controlling tyrant, acting out his shabby fantasies.