Coming to theaters this weekend opposite the bullets and espionage hijinks of a certain British super spy is quite possibly the polar opposite of No Time to Die: the Scandinavian thriller Lamb.
The movie is a thriller in only the Icelandic sense of the word: there are no jump scares, no hockey mask-wearing villains. Instead, it’s a haunting film about a couple on their Icelandic farm who are mourning the loss of a child when something very unusual happens to one of their pregnant sheep.
Noomi Rapace, who starred in Alien: Covenant and the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films, among others, explains she came to this very unconventional movie thanks to a “mood book” of photos and poems given to her by the movie’s director, Valdimar Jóhannsson.
“He just gave me that. And he was a bit blushy and red and he went outside and had a cigarette,” Rapace recalled to ABC Audio, cracking up Jóhannsson. “I’m like, ‘Wait, what? You’re not going to like pitch it?’ Are you not going to try to sell it to me? And he didn’t. He just let the material speak for itself.”
“I started like looking at those images that [were] so addictive,” said Rapace, “and then I knew straight away that I needed to do it.”
Noomi laughed, “Imagine when I call my team, it’s like, ‘So I’m going to do this like very small, no-budget Icelandic movie with a first-time director. And it’s about like a couple farmers that has like a baby that’s half human, half lamb. That’s what I’m doing, like, five months of my life.”
“And they’re like, Wait, what?” Rapace laughs, giggling.
Lamb was honored with the Un Certain Regard award for new filmmakers at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
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