Butler's Cinema Scene

Raffey Cassidy

“THE OTHER LAMB” My rating: B-

97 minutes | No MPAA rating

The feminist allegory “The Other Lamb” flirts mightily with pretension.  Good thing it’s so visually ravishing that it keeps you from asking the sort of questions that could deflate the whole affair.

Realizing that  Malgorzata Szumowska’s drama is about life in a religious cult, one might expect it to follow the template of other movies on that subject.

But Szumowska and screenwriter C.S. McMullen are more interested in establishing a dreamlike state than depicting harsh reality. And while their film eventually wears out its welcome, at least in the early going it’s fabulously seductive.

In a forest that looks like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale there is a small religious community.  It consists of nine adult women clad in long red dresses — they call themselves “the wives” — and nine younger females in blue identified as “the daughters.”

There’s only one man in sight. He’s known as The Shepherd (Michael Huisman, a veteran of HBO’s “Treme” and “Game of Thrones”) and he rules his flock with a seductive self-assurance.

His theology…well, it’s hard to say.  Occasionally the ladies will break out in a traditional Christian hymn, but The Shepherd practices a form of monotheism in which he’s at the top of the food/sex chain.

The women do all the work…herding real sheep, preparing meals, maintaining the shacks in which they live.  The Shepherd thinks deep thoughts, allows himself to be pampered like a pasha and each night takes a different bride to bed.

Raffey Cassidy, Michiel Huisman

We experience all this weirdness through the eyes of one of The Shepherd’s daughters. Selah (Raffey Cassidy), whose mother died in childbirth, has spent her entire life in the cult. She’s undergoing a major turning point: she’s experiencing her first period — a traumatic event, given that the lack of sex education in this place.

Traumatic also because it means that now she’s eligible for the sexual attentions of The Shepherd. Her father. Creepy.

Though she lacks anything like a formal education and has zero knowledge of life in the larger world, Selah has enough innate intelligence and a strong enough moral compass to question the rules under which she and the other women live.

She’s pushed further into dissent by Sarah (Denise Gough), a wife currently on the outs with The Shepherd who has become disillusioned with the whole operation.

After setting up this premise the screenplay devotes its second act to  The Shepherd’s search for a new home. Apparently he’s been thrown off the land the group have long occupied; now he leads his flock on foot across a cold, windswept landscape (the film was shot in a ruggedly beautiful part of Ireland) in search of a new Eden.

“The Other Lamb”  ostensibly takes place in the U.S.A. (we see an American flag at one point, people talk in flat Midwestern tones and the cars have the drivers’ seat on the left), but the terrain looks like nothing in North America. We don’t really understand how this group could have survived without money or legal standing. And why are there no boy children in the group?

The film has been adequately acted, although at times the performances have a weirdly Kabuki quality. The real hero here is cinematographer Michal Englert, whose images are so compelling I found myself hanging in there just to see what he would deliver next.

| Robert W. Butler