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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. Abetted by a performance of unwaveringly invested, freckled seriousness from Noomi Rapace (whose Icelandic certainly sounds convincing to a non-Nordic ear), “Lamb” is as curious a cross-breed as its central little miracle-monster, and just as much a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Way out here on this isolated hillside, something is spooking the horses. In a majestic beginning, featuring some quite brilliant animal acting (“Lamb” won the Cannes Palm Dog Award for its canine performer, but were there equivalents for equine, feline and of course ovine actors, it would surely have swept the board), the camera prowls and plods its point-of-view way through misty fields. Finally this unseen, not-human-but-not-wholly-animal entity, whose unheimlich nature we understand through the huffing and snorting of Ingvar Lunderg and Björn Viktorsson’s endlessly inventive sound design, and through the panicked fleeing of livestock at its approach, arrives at the sheep barn. Docile ewes huddle together, but one is singled out and something is done to her. The radio plays a Christmas song.
