Ada, a sentient being with subjective selfhood, is trying to work out who and what she is, but keeps being defined by those around her according to how they can make her represent what they feel entitled to. The human couple take a child they think they're owed to compensate for the loss of their own child, and the ram-demon gets hammurabic on the spouse of the killer of "his" "spouse (assault victim)". The horror is how people and peoples reduce each other to just the aspects they can use to fulfill their own needs, in interpersonal relationships and in political systems of oppression. Maria to Ada's biomum is like "stop wanting Ada, she's mine, and you can't have her" and kills her, Petur to Maria and Ingvar is like "stop caring about that abomination, it's of no use to me, and also Maria is mine", and the Ram-demon to Maria is like "you killed my ewe, so I'll kill your husband now, and also this is mine too" and takes Ada. He doesn't represent nature, since sheep aren't native to Iceland (and tend to be vehicles of colonialist devastation in most of the places you find them), he's the incarnation of bestial dehumanising narcissism.

@erisk.1707

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks you a lot, now the movie makes a whole lot more sense to me.

@AmandaTroutman

2 жыл бұрын

Great explanation!

@xxxWolFangxxx

2 жыл бұрын

Excellent write up. I agree that fundamentally this is a film about identity and the strangely normal concept of owning other human beings

@tillyqtillyq3750

2 жыл бұрын

I also was thinking it'd be weird if he represented nature bc he's the part of the equation that meant Ada was half human rather than all sheep

@jacobsirois7585

2 жыл бұрын

I think it's a reflection of developed nations adopting children from undeveloped nations. The ruling class herding less developed nations like they are sheep.

Describing a conception as “Extremely Macculate” is why I follow this channel.

@blarg2429

2 жыл бұрын

Same.

@swistian

Жыл бұрын

That one got me. 🎯

“blurring the lines between sheep and person AND GUN” took me out

As someone from a sheep farming family it reminds me a little how sometimes you get a lamb who is born unwell so you take it into the house you know, and nurse it and eventually you start to see it as a pet and you it's very sweet you have this cute little fluffy baby baaing at you and stuff, but then, the sheep gets bigger and older and more destructive either she wants to join the flock or he wants to bash into everything and you are forced to confront the reality that farm animals make poor house pets so you just let it be and live as a farm animal. So it's probably about attachment to live stock or something like that? Or maybe they just wanted to show off their cute little lamb child?

@PetaloudesTouYialou

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, you might be right - living a fairly wild, free-range childhood myself, we had the triple bind of initially what you describe as the pet/farm animal conflict, and then in my culture, the "all animals are dirty" thing, which conflicted with us having cats and dogs as pets, and particularly, having dogs as working animals too. Sometimes the wisdom of nature swept away any delusions or impositions we tried to make on animals.

@jupitermelichios392

2 жыл бұрын

My first instinct was to ask if theres a scene where they put the lamb baby into the oven to warm up, and then realised thats probably not as universal a sheep farming experience as I assumed, lol (for clarification thats not to cook them - farmhouses here mostly have range cookers that have a bottom oven that never gets properly hot thats used for warming plates or keeping food warm, which make the perfect place to warm up a half frozen christmas lamb)

@saulitix

2 жыл бұрын

If that's the case and intention of the filmmakers then idk why they thought that's a profound or interesting concept to explore. Like, cool, now I can relate to farmers that take care of a sheep for a while until they realize that they are not pets? Seems weird to me.

Saying 'sheeps' is right up there with 'skellington' as something that my mind tells me is just kinda stupid, but my heart delights in every single time.

@giddycadet

2 жыл бұрын

and whenever they refer to vampires as "draculas"

@pronounsinmybio

2 жыл бұрын

me and the word "chimkin" and that "its fuckin WIMBDY" meme

@TheHopperUK

2 жыл бұрын

@@giddycadet Yes! Extremely high-tier in my opinion.

@SoSoMikaela

2 жыл бұрын

For me, it's something that my mind tells me is just extremely stupid but my heart decidedly _does not_ delight in, either. Every single time.

@TheHopperUK

2 жыл бұрын

@@SoSoMikaela I'm sorry, that sounds rough!

"why couldn't she just be a cute lamb that goes to school in her puffy coat like Paddington" - leia on Letterboxd

I think the movie is really just about how we humans feel entitled to taking whatever we want from nature but that doing so will eventually lead to consequences (like probably death via killing the planet or something) but you bring up a good point about small sheep farmers probably not being the best representation of destructive humans

@sholem_bond

2 жыл бұрын

Tbh if they had shown more of the stuff animal farmers do that could be considered morally wrong onscreen (milking the sheep, shearing the sheep, or slaughtering sheep/lambs), it would have been a lot easier to get this message from the film. Even though I agree small farmers aren't the major cause of climate change, I could still watch this and be like "ah yes the movie is saying that humans are exploiting living creatures' bodies (obviously without anything approaching consent), and that's wrong, especially given how clearly arbitrary and fluid the movie seems to present the categories 'human' vs. 'animal' as being." I could just assume the small farm is supposed to be symbolic/representative of animal farming as an industry, and/or that this was the farm they had access to for filming, or thought would be most cinematic. That in and of itself doesn't break my immersion. But because we never see anything approaching the full horror that being classified 'animal' within this system would be, it's hard to be sure that that's the theme. And it doesn't seem like it's intended to be ambiguous, it seems more like it wasn't done very consistently. Because the plot idea of a sheep-human hybrid baby inherently seems like it questions the divide between 'animals' and 'sapient beings (like humans)' automatically ... but then also, according to Mildred, the movie seems to suggest that maybe treating Ada like a conscious, sapient being (like a human) is bad (although you're right, it could also be saying 'taking babies away from their biological mothers by force is bad' and 'exploiting animals is bad'). Again, I guess it could be intended to be ambiguous, or intentionally vague so people will disagree about it and talk about it more, sparking more interest.

@eduardoruiz7600

2 жыл бұрын

@@sholem_bond a lot of great points in your response! Whether intentional or not the movies message is for sure ambiguous and a little confusing though leading to conversations like this haha

@occupyvenus4868

2 жыл бұрын

@@sholem_bond Sheep will literally overheat in the summer and suffer or even die if you don't shear them. It's not "morally wrong" but necessary.

@TayTayMakesBeats

2 жыл бұрын

Could also be commenting on how people tend to adopt domesticated animals as a substitute for human children. Who knows though. My doggos are very happy and no, I am not interested in having children.

@pearkore6821

2 жыл бұрын

oh like The Happening

Near as I can figure, with a little help from TV Tropes, the core "problem" that sets things in motion is that Ingvar and María just took Ada to raise as their own and while they DO make good parents for her, it was still selfish and cruel to essentially steal a child from its mother, and then they make things worse by murdering the ewe to try and keep Ada for themselves. And then at the end of the movie, the couple's cruelty is repaid in the exact same manner, with Ingvar being callously shot by Ada's biological dad. I'm guessing the movie was trying to not be "too obvious" with this sort of mirroring by having Ingvar get shot instead of María? But it probably could have helped if that had been made more explicit, like having him get shot in the dome like the ewe was. And I think the movie muddles that message by showing Ingvar and María caring for Ada so well and stuff, because it blunts the point the movie was trying to make that their decision to take her was motivated by selfishness and these events could have been avoided if they'd, like, involved Ada's ewe mom more in her life somehow instead of just trying to keep her away and eventually killing her. Also, I think the trailer may have misrepresented the movie; it makes it seem like the ewe following the couple is threatening or ominous, while the movie seems to make it more sad, like the ewe just wants to see her lamb, so the killing is less about protecting themselves and more about them desiring to keep Ada.

@YouCallThataKnife253

2 жыл бұрын

In that case, then, it sounds like they should have made the baby lamb magically turn more human as it is in the care of the human parents, rather than a human/lamb hybrid from birth, which would cause conflict in any sane person 🤷🏾

@lonely_space_egg

2 жыл бұрын

@@YouCallThataKnife253 I agree, I think a decision like that could have been a good message about the harms of anthropomorphizing animals.

@GeoffreyToday

2 жыл бұрын

I'd have to wonder though, if the film is trying to convey that taking Ada and raising her as a human was a selfish and cruel decision, what was the alternative? Like, Ingvar and Maria don't know about Ramdad, all they know is that for reasons beyond comprehension, one of their sheep has given birth to a human baby with a lamb's head. Is Ada's sheep mom equipped to raise a human baby just because it has a lamb's head? I would guess no. Like, I don't think the movie makes it plain that the decision is supposed to be viewed as selfish and cruel, because the same would be true of leaving Ada to live in a barn and be raised by sheep. I just don't think they as farmers and we as an audience would assume Ada would even survive in that scenario, because, you know, human baby with a lamb head.

@Jane-oz7pp

2 жыл бұрын

@@GeoffreyToday Well since it had a lamb head and was literally birthed by a ewe, the assumption that it's human at all is ridiculous. It's clearly a mutated sheep that they misidentified as being human. The alternative, and correct decision is to leave the thing with it's mother, and let it live like a mutated sheep, with it's people.

@Owesomasaurus

2 жыл бұрын

I guess the real question is, did we need the trauma of children being separated from their birth culture to be raised in the dominant, hegemonic culture (such as the Canadian residential school system or the Australian "stolen generation" of Aboriginal children) explored through the metaphor of sheep baby?

I'm kinda confident that ewe just made this movie up.

@oldvlognewtricks

2 жыл бұрын

I herd it was shear parody

@JoshIsMakingMusic

2 жыл бұрын

@@oldvlognewtricks the film's writers were actually accused of theft recently, last I heard, they're on the lamb.

@Cesaryeyo

2 жыл бұрын

Your puns are so bad you should be lamb-asted until you become more sheepish. I wanna ram my head into a wall.

@JoshIsMakingMusic

2 жыл бұрын

@@Cesaryeyo watch out, we got a baaaaaahd boy over here.

@Cesaryeyo

2 жыл бұрын

@@JoshIsMakingMusic I don't like your tone one bleat. I wool'd appreciate it if you stopped

Usually in film, open doors signal that a character has trapped themselves in a situation they could easily get themselves out of. An open door, surrounded on all sides by darkness means an enclosed space, but with an easily accessible exit. The person could leave that situation if they wanted to, but for whatever reason, they don't. If the person is inside looking out, it means their freedom is readily available, but if they are outside looking into a dark space, through an open door, it denotes danger and entrapment. This is not a hard and fast rule, but the general symbolism behind open doors in movies. But yeah, I dont know what was going on in this movie even though my eyeballs looked at it...

@thefatherinthecave943

2 жыл бұрын

Maybe it’s a story about a goatman fucking some sheep farmers sheep, the farmers raising the sheep-person as their own child and then having their sheep child taken away. Maybe it’s a hamfisted analogy about livestock farming

@zoushaomenohu

2 жыл бұрын

That makes a certain amount of sense; Ingvar and María COULD have resolved the situation with the ewe in much less extreme ways than they chose to, but because they took the nuclear option they only made things worse for themselves.

@Tacklepig

2 жыл бұрын

Idk, I feel like the open doors here represent an inability (or unwillingness) to move on. It really seems to mostly be a metaphor for grief, for replacing your lost child with something else. A surprising number of people get pets as replacement for children and then end up humanizing the pet too much. But I also feel like this story is meant to be half-literal. Like, on one hand it's a metaphor for grief, on the other hand there's a literal half-sheep monster that ultimately reclaims his daughter. Sometimes stories are just more fun when you don't analyse them.

@notarabbit1752

2 жыл бұрын

idk I think its just because they live on a farm. like the old saying about closing the door.

@cajunguy6502

2 жыл бұрын

Where do you learn this kind of stuff?

So, I haven't seen it, but based upon the shots you show, tour descriptions, and other people's comments on it....I think the ambiguity IS the theme. Ada is neither lamb nor human, or both. Petur is either a brother (in-law) or lover, or both. The human parents are either good (for adopting a human child of unconventional circumstances and appearance ) or evil (for kidnapping a child from their righrful family,) or, again, both. I grew up on farms, spent a lot of time out in the fields, and everything is blurred together after a while. Farmers are crucial to feeding large swathes of the human population, and their job is essentially giving life. But they must must cruel towards nature to do it (even if it's not always obvious.) All farming has some aspect of cruelty towards nature wrapped up in it. I learned how to shoot hunting gophers, because the holes they would dig would break cows legs and lead to the cow dying painfully. But neither the cow nor the gopher was taking a deliberate action. We, the farmers were, because the cruelty towards the gophers was an act of kindness towards the cows. And, honestly, our bank account. I don't know the details of farming where the movie is from, but we killed a lot of animals to protect our flock of sheep, too. I remember my dad killing a bunch of raccoons - one of the objectively cutest and more intelligent animals on the planet - because the raccoons kept massacring our ducks, chickens, and rabbits (and severely injuring our barn cats, who kept trying to fight the raccoons off.) And I think the idea of cruelty and kindness blending together, of being ambiguous, is a big theme on this movie. And that's maybe what the open doors are about. Weirdly, I'm reminded of an old Charmed episode, where fairies could enter the world through windows or doorways or anything that was "a 'tween place" as they called. You know, not one thing or the other. An ambiguous space between one state or another, where both are simultaneously true, and the supernatural world can enter the natural world. I do arrive that idea also because of all the different comments with variously different interpretations that all sound plausible. Like, we all have to come to our own moral decisions about what we are OK with doing and what we will stand up against. But, despite what we may wish, there isn't actually a universal system of right and wrong. Everything is ambiguous. We live in the 'tween space, and what we may consider kindness could be cruelty to others, just as cruelties done to us may be seen as kindness by others. In short the fact that there is no easily grasped and understood point, could, in fact be the point. It's a slow burning horror because, as much as we are all the heroes of our own stories, we could easily be the monsters in the stories of other people without realizing it. For many of us, life itself is a slow burning horror with no point to it, except for the meanings we invent for ourselves.

@a1t3rsworld

2 жыл бұрын

i love your interpretation thanks for writing down your lovely thoughts!

my girlfriend and I saw this when it first came out in theaters - the closest theater showing it was two hours away lol - and nearly the whole way back we were trying to decipher it. I think what its ULTIMATELY about, or at least a theory I'm willing to defend, is that it's about the idea of what constitutes a "family." Cause a family is another societal construct when you get down to it right? And different living beings see it differently. Each of the parental figures in this film - first the sheep that literally gave birth to Ada, then Maria and Ingvar, then Petur, then the dilf demon goat dad at the end, have a different and conflicting idea of how Ada should be treated as a child. (Even calling her Ada - Maria and Ingvar decided to call her that. She was not born with a name immutable to herself, but had the name "Ada" and the title of "daughter" and all that given to her, or maybe imposed on her.) While the sheep mother sees Ada as one of her own lambs and calls to her, (does she want Ada back? Can we know? is that anthropomorphizing onto a sheep too much to give it family ties and character motivation?) Maria obviously ultimately sees Ada as Human Enough to be her child. This is Petur's character arc - he starts by seeing Ada as an animal that should either be in the barn or shot, to accepting her as part of the family. Demon dad at the end, however, has no such inner conflict. Ada is his, and doesn't hesitate to take her from Ingvar. He's not her "real" father. The question we're left with is, what does it mean to have a child? Is a child yours because you birthed it? Because you raised it? Because it's more like you than it is like them? I think Lamb is an interesting movie, but I don't know that it is entirely a successful one. I agree with you that it's too sparse. I absolutely love stories where nothing happens, I am a big fan of slow meditative cinema and all that, but I think too many clarifying story beats were sacrificed for the sake of tone. The moody atmosphere is interesting, but a murky, mysterious puddle is still just a little puddle. May I recommend, if one is looking for a film about the cultural imposition of structures on relationships and examines dehumanization and animalization in a weird a24 movie to please please please check out Yorgos Lanthimos's "The Lobster." Or, if you want a movie about the perils of trying to parent some weird fucked up baby, try David Lynch's "Eraserhead" ?

@erectlocution

2 жыл бұрын

I dig this.

@chriscze6153

2 жыл бұрын

I will read all of this, but I clicked thumbs up for the dilf demon goat dad part. Classic.

@Mewobiba

2 жыл бұрын

Gods, I'd love to see a Scaredy Cats episode on Eraserhead.

@doejersey

2 жыл бұрын

Yea pretty similar experience to me and my SO. I interpreted it as more of a stolen happiness story. But with a very similar analysis to yours. Basically what right did the family have to take Ada? I believe it was implied that they had some kind of child loss, and the characters definitely go from a state of unrest to a state of tranquility over the run of the movie around Ada. Basically the moral being the happiness they grew to have with Ada was at the expense of the sheep/sheep man. Who we should feel justified that the sheepman returned for his baby? Less good explanation is that the family represents the status quo and the sheep represent people in society. And The family represents a ruling class? So the arc is that the ruling class steals fulfillment and happiness from the people. But idk the sheepman thing at the end shooting the father character really throws this for a loop. Totally agree. Something was definitely happening during production that everyone on the film “got it” and assumed everyone would too, or there was some cutting that happened which removed some key details to really solidify on something. As released in October this was a messy attempt that never really clearly got anywhere.

@SuicidalPolarbears-np6tu

2 жыл бұрын

love the take, hate that you called him "dilf demon goat dad"

I find all this confusion a bit comforting, honestly. I can almost never figure out what movies "mean" without help, unless they REALLY spell it out. Like I figure out that Star Wars opposed fascism because they just put the space fascists in nazi uniforms and called some of them Stormtroopers, but hearing that Babadook was about grief blew my mind. Sometimes it's nice to not be the only one sitting there thinking. "As far as I can tell, the deeper meaning of this is that a goat man fucked a sheep, and humans raised the baby because they wanted to."

@Geospasmic

2 жыл бұрын

I feel the same way. I can't analyze art, I think that's why I go for these kinds of thoughtful reviews. I can enjoy movies in all kinds of ways but I often don't "get" them until they're explained.

@bretthansen3739

2 жыл бұрын

@@Geospasmic I think I'm starting to learn how, very slowly, by watching channels like this.

@pepi7404

2 жыл бұрын

When you're in doubt, just assume it's a metaphor for grief.

I feel Lamb is a movie about comparisons and their consequences. Throughout the movie, Ada's differences are both emphasized and diminished by her adoptive parents. Their ability to care for Ada is compromised not only by their excessive fixation on what separates her from a "normal" child, (like Ada's namesake) but also their attempts to ignore her differences entirely. These comparisons are shown to stem from Ingvar and María's fixation on the past rather than Ada herself. By regarding Ada through comparison, they create problems that could be easily resolved by paying attention to Ava and seeing her as an individual. The solution is right in front of them, like an open door, but their past is making it difficult for them to notice. I assume the goatman represents the culminating effects of Ada's treatment. Her relationship with her parents (the ones who raised her) is permanently damaged.

@dunningdunning4711

2 жыл бұрын

I really like this interpretation.

Maybe who really f#cked a sheep were the friends we met along the way. Maybe we should make new friends.

I really loved Lamb but not because I found it very scary, but because it was like 90 whole minutes of cottagecore fantasy where I got to pretend I was a farmer living in a cozy hygge farmhouse in the snow with my wife and our half-lamb daughter.

@PynkSpotsYT

2 жыл бұрын

underrated comment 😂👭🏡🐑💕

@ragevsraid7703

2 жыл бұрын

@@PynkSpotsYT indeed

@digitallurke7710

2 жыл бұрын

Bonus points awarded for Hygge!

@saulitix

2 жыл бұрын

3/10 for plot, 9/10 for vibes

@mayalouwho2597

Жыл бұрын

Same lol I told my mom it was about those calico critters

"Long, slow, and pretty pointless." Welcome to the wonderful world of Icelandic cinema! May I suggest The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre next? Edit: The ear-tagging/cutting is done because most of our sheep are free-grazing and get all mixed up during the summer - in the fall they all get brought back and sorted by tag/bit, with each farm having their own pattern of bitting. Edit 2: The dude who wrote the movie is a surrealist poet. Maybe that explains something.

@ashikjaman1940

2 жыл бұрын

What's the whale movie about?

@maybelikealittlebit

2 жыл бұрын

Maybe some lidocaine injected before just brutalizing the lambs would be a bit more humane? Im all for eating and keeping animals but humanely. We aren’t in the 1900s anymore, there’s a lot better ways to keep our animals happy before we eat em.

@tinnagigja3723

2 жыл бұрын

@@ashikjaman1940 Whale watchers vs whalers.

@NicolasCaja

2 жыл бұрын

Is that Warmbo?

@camelopardalis84

2 жыл бұрын

Please, no, don't be here. No. I get it, it's a horror channel. But the horror should be *discussed* in the *video* , not *await* me in the *comment section* !

I think you also not understanding this movie conversely finally made me understand it. Death is a part of nature, and Ada the lamb is an attempt to reclaim their dead daughter (taking it from nature). The sheep here symbolize death. Ada is in this half-lamb/ half-human state because the parents refuse to let go of their dead child. So, the Christ allusions are intentional but not because Ada is a savior. Because Mary was forced to outlive her child. So, the ending is death fully claiming Ada and the mother letting go. Ingvar, who feels more guilty about the death (having nightmares about searching for her body out in the wetlands) is unable to let go and must therefor thematically die. Or...maybe the film was just weird nonsense.

@oldvlognewtricks

2 жыл бұрын

I took Ingvar’s death as their relationship breaking down as a result of clinging on to Ada. He’s dead to Maria, ‘killed’ by the ram man… who I imagine is death taking Ada away.

@NBNightingale

2 жыл бұрын

@@oldvlognewtricks That probably works better with her final breath seeming to be an expression of relief.

@oldvlognewtricks

2 жыл бұрын

@@NBNightingale I still wonder about her shooting the parent sheep… Self-annihilation or shame? Would be weird if it’s symbolic of her literally stealing someone else’s child. Sheep/lambs are also symbolic of purity and innocence. Maybe the parent sheep was her vulnerability and emotion that she killed? Her fear of her own mortality? Something about the ‘sacrificial lamb’?

@widgie161

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah I think you’re completely right.

@wnightshade

2 жыл бұрын

I like how well this analysis holds up. Nice work.

I liked this movie, but it could be cut down to a great 20 minute short film (the brother's presence is pure padding). I view the film like a Grimm's Fairy Tale, in which a grieving mother steals and raises a child that is not hers, and is in turn punished for this misdeed. There is plenty of symbolism relating to the themes of nature / nurture, found family, and the enigmatic order of the universe (which is both knowable and unpredictable). But there isn't anything more to 'get' here; it is a mysterious and atmospheric parable with deliberate pacing and unnecessary ambiguity.

@finngswan3732

2 жыл бұрын

Kinda what I got from the description as well. It's going for a parable vibe. Maybe you could argue the brother was a mislead for what danger lurks.

I'm just going to assume that Lamb is just a stealth sequel to "Sorry to Bother You." Damn.. they missed a trick and should have called this movie "Sorry to Bother Ewe."

This is like Stuart Little if you really take the time to think about giving birth to a hybrid animal-child (what the books said, not the films) instead of making it a whimsical children's tale

@user-hc2tu7ul7j

2 жыл бұрын

Accurate! This is Stuart little told in a Nordic high tale style. It does not work, Stuart little stories need to be told whimsically

@Mark-nh2hs

2 жыл бұрын

This is modern horror generation we are talking about they need their exposition dump every 10 seconds as they are unable to work things out lol

I... Why was the Ram-man so caked up for no reason?!!? Why am i lowkey into the Ram man? Also... Why do i now want Ramen???

@gearandalthefirst7027

2 жыл бұрын

:|

It might be a reference to an old folk tail "The Ram Man". I stayed at a summer camp in southern Louisiana right near where he was supposedly born, visited the church where there's mural of him. Given this takes place about 5,000 miles away, it's probably not the SAME folklore, but it's shockingly similar. In the version I heard, a demon possessed goat r***d a human woman, and she died in childbirth. But the child was adopted by the local church, purged of his evil, and lived most of his younger life as a monk, before slowly becoming feral when he reached adulthood and disappearing into the woods. For the record, I was 11 and sleeping in a cabin in those woods hundreds of miles from home when I was told this story.

Without having actually seen the movie, it sounds like it’s about adoption and family separation. Being taken from your first family can be traumatizing, even when your adoptive parents love you and take good care of you. Maria & Ingvar love Ada, but their motivation for taking her from her mother was to fill a hole in THEIR hearts, not to give her a family. They keep her from her sheep birth mother, going so far as to the kill the ewe. Of course Ada’s humanoid intelligence and habits fit life in a house better than a field, but by keeping from even spending time with her birth mother, they cut her off from fully understanding herself and the creatures she came from. Maria & Ingvar are not bad people, but their willingness to do violence in order to keep Ada with them is returned in kind by her satyr-like birth father when he kills Ingvar to snatch her away. Ada isn’t allowed to know her birth family on her terms and her best interests aren’t necessarily at the forefront of the minds of those violently asserting their right to parent her

I can see this being analogous to the foster system if you take out all the sheep imagery and cast people in its place. It starts with a single mother and an unknown father, portrayed as some kind of vague but sinister threat. The ewe is viewed by the authorities in control of the ewe's life as unfit to parent her own child, and said authorities seize the child to raise as they deem appropriate, but ultimately in service to selfish motives. By human standards, the lamb's life is materially improved, but in the meantime her birth mother's circumstances haven't changed. When the ewe uses whatever means are at her disposal to demand custody of her child, she is permanently and violently silenced by the system while the lamb is kept in ignorance about her heritage. (The doing of this must be an acknowledged evil, otherwise the brother wouldn't have attempted to use it as a blackmail.) The lamb continues to live a more or less comfortable childhood until the arrival of her biological father, possibly released from Ram Prison, returns to take custody of his lamb. In the eyes of Ada, confronted with her identity for the first time in the worst way possible, this is a violent and traumatizing removal from the only parents she's ever known. In the eyes of the system, the foster parents are helpless as the horrible, dirty ram-man monster legally takes the helpless, innocent child. It may be attempting to provide a literal view of how foster children and their birth families are perceived. The child is half-human at best, more a possession than a person, while her birth parents are given no consideration as human beings whatsoever. The circumstances of her birth parents are seen as their only qualifications for parenting, and it's never questioned how they wound up in those circumstances to begin with. If the plot was intended to be a grim depiction of the status quo as it exists, it would have been better to say that explicitly, without the symbolic veneer. It's more of a family drama under the guise of speculative fantasy rather than a horror film.

@daraghokane4236

2 жыл бұрын

Lamb girl is cute that's the point of the film

@wmdkitty

2 жыл бұрын

Kids aren't just randomly placed in care, it's because the parents are putting the child in danger, or are unable/unwilling to meet the child's needs.

@Jane-oz7pp

2 жыл бұрын

add to that an element of the way that the foster system is frequently weaponised against Indigenous and African-descended people in most white countries and I think that's a pretty solid read of the film. I disagree that making it more explicit is better, though. Because at the end of the day the best way to convince someone of something is to convince them that they came to that conclusion on their own.

@Jane-oz7pp

2 жыл бұрын

@@wmdkitty You must be white.

@author_page

2 жыл бұрын

@@wmdkitty Your statement contains nothing that contradicts my summary, and like the film, doesn't critically analyze the systems which keep sheep (people) in pens (poverty). Nor does it question the people in power who determine the fitness of the parents to raise their offspring, such as the Canadian government's forced adoption program for indigenous children. I encourage you to watch Pam Palmater's well researched video "Canada Battles First Nations Kids in Foster Care" or the CBC news discussion with Dr. Cindy Blackstock on the subject of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's findings.

Certain parts of the way Ada is portrayed and treated by other characters reminded me of the way neurodivergent children are treated. Like having weird tastes, physical abnormalities in certain cases, having her humanity questioned because she doesn’t act in the same way a neurotypical child would, Getting easily overwhelmed, etc. Depending on how you look on the movie from that perspective it can kind of make it kinda better or worse. Like her bio-mom getting killed might symbolize how her adoptive parents are trying to suppress that part of her (her sheepness/neurodivergency) rather then making accommodations so she can live more comfortably. But I don’t know if that’s what the film makers where intending.

I interpreted Ingvar's death as a metaphor for a grieving parent committing suicide, since he is killed by his natural counterpart, Ada's biological father, and because Maria finds him later with no explanation of what happened. In her mind, the most likely possibility would be that he let Ada go free into the wild and then took his own life out of guilt over seemingly contributing in some way to the original Ada's death. So it seems like the film is not only stating that the past can never truly be reclaimed (all those doors are probably supposed to represent the boundaries between different stages of life) but also that one person's otherwise-harmless coping mechanism can end up being a destructive force to those around them. It's not necessarily an indictment of Maria's choices, just an exploration of how grief can tear a relationship apart without either person ever intending to hurt the other, as well as how all of this relates to the idea of innocence. Maria kills Ada's mother in order to maintain the illusion of worldly innocence that she's found in Ada, while Ingvar is killed by a very literal embodiment of the harsh disillusionment that innocence always eventually grows into. If Maria IS supposed to be painted as responsible for any of this, she doesn't seem to have comprehended as much by the end and likely never will, which is perhaps even more tragic.

Your critiques of the cinematography are how I felt about Hagazussa. An absolutely beautiful movie, every shot is breathtaking, but even beautiful moody mountains get old if there's nothing but mountain shots for 15 minutes. I will say Hagazussa did actually have clear things it was telling you, so in that regard it does a little better.

@UnfertigeGedanken

2 жыл бұрын

and you summed up hagazussa for me ^^ i wouldnt say its bad at all but its just "not a lot" for the length it runs.

@Furthest1

2 жыл бұрын

I think my reactions to these two movies were similar but reversed - I absolutely hated Hagazussa despite how much I wanted to fall in love with it based on the imagery and music. Lamb on the other hand I enjoyed a great deal, as a peaceful meditative experience, despite getting little to nothing out of the story and subtext.

@jonathanboram7858

2 жыл бұрын

@@Furthest1 some nominative determinism going on there?

@Furthest1

2 жыл бұрын

@@jonathanboram7858 baaaaaaaaaaa

I think there's a lot of undertones in this film about the difference between humans and animals being a lot more blurry and socially constructed than one might assume given the culture we live in. Ada seems to have been taken in as a human from her own mother solely because she's more anthropomorphic, and is raised and treated like a human and therefore takes on more aspects of one. The same consideration is never once given to her mother who is shot in the head for caring about her daughter. But why is that? That being said this movie was boring as hell

@PauLtus_B

Жыл бұрын

I agree with your interpretion. I didn't think it was boring. Maybe it's my vegan ass but I found it quite obvious that it explores the bizarre human-animal relationship.

based PURELY on the description you have given here, of the plot, my guess would be that the film is about domesticity, and domestication- you can take an animal and treat it like a human and raise it like a human but the best you're going to get is something that no longer fits in either world and will probably, eventually, give in to whatever wildness it once had. Like chimps who go feral and rip the faces off their human 'parents'. But I am absolutely BULLSHITTING that and I feel like it falls apart if poked too hard.

@asmodiusjones9563

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, the issue is, sheep are domesticated animals. If you let a domesticated sheep out in the wild, their wool would grow until they couldn’t move around and they’d die. It would make more sense if it was like a wolf/human hybrid or something.

@willmckinley4257

2 жыл бұрын

Ding ding ding! Your bullshit answer is my REAL answer as to what this movie is about. The main characters are farmers, who specialize in taking nature and turning it to human ends. I think the open doors represent a blurring of inside/outside, wild and domesticated. It's all there, and I think it's pretty clear. Maybe even TOO clear. To me, Lamb felt like they had a good idea for a short film, but they really wanted to make a feature. It's a movie which is, in my opinion, light on plot, dialogue, and ideas.

Really expected Bobby Dook to come in with a rifle at the end and take Mildread away from us, but that'd probably be too muddled a metaphor

@dextra9753

2 жыл бұрын

ZLOYXP???????????????? YOU'RE HERE????

"And rather than an Immaculate Conception, Ada is born from a sheep man funking a sheep, which seems Extremely Macculate." I don't know why, but that just got to me

Yo that eye makeup is lookin fierce tho

Based on what I see here, to me this feels like it's meant to be read as an allegory for having a child with a disability. I feel like Ada's sheep head is about how she's perceived as being less capable and less human than people who don't have her allegorical sheep disability,. The grave marker with the same name as hers feels like it's about how some parents will mourn a child who isn't dead because of the hypothetical healthy child they wish they had instead. It doesn't really feel like it's a story about Ada's experience of her metaphorical sheep head disability so much as it's about how hard it is to have a child with a disability, how it makes the parents feel isolated from each other and the outside world, how people will say cruel things about your child up to and including suggesting to kill them. Ada leaving with the sheep man at the end of the movie could mean she died of her condition, or it could be like that thing where some parents will say things like "Autism took my baby! I just want my normal healthy baby back!". If this is what they were going for tbh it feels like Ada is more so just a prop in her parent's inspiration/trauma martyrdom porn story than a character in her own right. I'm very intimately aware of the difficulties associated with raising a child with a disability, but it must be possible to tell stories like that without treating people with disabilities like they're just obstacles for the able bodied and neurotypical people in their lives completely divorced of any agency, or even just personality.

First things first, you get a subscription and an upvote for validating my emotions. Second, I'm sure my brain isn't bigger, but as soon as I saw the end of this film, I said, "This is a Perry Bible Fellowship comic. Am I crazy? Is this not a Perry Bible Fellowship comic?" I think it'd be a longer one, maybe a whole page of a man having a nice day out with his lamb baby - ice cream, a carousel ride, perhaps a petting zoo - and in the last three panels the sheep-man shows up. "I knew this day would come," says the man, and the sheep-man blows him away and goes back to the carnival with the lamb baby holding his hand. And maybe a nice balloon. The end. I may, in fact, be crazy, but I don't think I'm wrong here!

In all fairness your confusion from this is pretty intentional on the creators' part. Jóhannsson and Rapace built this entire movie around a few drawings of the end creature (as well as Ada) and I'm not even remotely kidding. They didn't even start writing for this until a few years after they began toying with shots and characters. They added a few vague touches of folklore (if you squint), past childhood experiences Jóhannsson had on a family farm, and purposefully kept everything else vague. They've literally stated that the ending means whatever you decide it means and that they don't have a set symbolism for any of the characters or the plot or whatever else. So whatever you decide is correct... is technically correct. The meaning, if any, is what you make of it. They just wanted to make something aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking (in a "eh it's whatever" kind of way), and poetic. I honestly think they wanted to make something pretty and poetic more than anything else. And hey... that's cool. It's visually interesting in that classic Scandi way of filming. I think you'd get more out of watching something like the Danish drama "Jagten" (The Hunt in English) as it has a lot of the same aesthetics, the same amount of "horror", and actually has a well thought out and interesting message in the end. It also has Mads Mikkelsen. :)

LOL!!! Dude! my homie suggested this to me and a friend. We spent a whole hour on our podcast roasting him for this. We got real gully with him for this. And now I wish you were there. It would have been epic. Love your channel, bruh. Keep it going.

“Have someone jangle keys in your face for two and half hours” Great review!

Right after I watched this movie in the theater with my girlfriend, I remember the conversation afterwards. We both kept talking about how we both really liked and REALLY disliked the movie. As the person in the relationship who desperately needs to rationalize EVERYTHING, I spent several minutes in the car grasping at possible symbolic meanings of the characters and their interactions. Is Ada supposed to represent innocence in a cruel and uncaring world? Is Ada supposed to represent the Earth amidst climate change? Are Maria and Ingvar supposed to represent Mary (mother of Jesus) and Joseph (Mary's sugar daddy)? Would that make Ada Jesus? My girlfriend looked it up while I was incoherently rambling and she told me that the director meant for it to kind of be a weird folktale/Christmas story mishmash, but every interpretation could be valid and any of the characters or story beats could represent any number of possible themes or elements. It could mean ANYTHING to ANYONE. We drove out of the parking lot and I distinctly remember saying, "I don't regret watching it, but I would NEVER recommend it to anyone else." I stand by that position.

@gorimbaud

2 жыл бұрын

joseph wasn't mary's sugar daddy, he was just her husband. god was mary's sugar daddy.

@JamesELLYale

2 жыл бұрын

Well Joseph was a provider for Mary and another man's child. Maybe Joseph was into some weird cuckoldry/humiliation shit. There are many different ways to attain sugar daddy status. However, I want to be clear that I am not here to discuss the kinks that biblical figures did or did not have regardless of how hot my takes may be.

@artstsym

2 жыл бұрын

"It could mean anything to anyone" is the ultimate Bookman's Bluff.

@TheShadowOfMars

2 жыл бұрын

​@@JamesELLYale Joseph and Mary were cousins - Joseph's father and Mary's mother were both children of Matthan the priest. The title "virgin" came from her position as a chaste temple maiden. Becoming pregnant would have been a terrible scandal, so finding a husband was imperative for saving both herself and her child from social ostracism. As an elderly widower, Joseph was willing to marry her as an act of charity towards an unfortunate family member. I say elderly, because he's completely absent from all stories of Jesus's life except the birth and infancy.

"About an hour in you're like 'oh my god, die already' " made me laugh out loud

"Hey Ingvar?" - I cackled every single time

Riding Midsommar's coat tails. We all appreciate an honest content creator. Tbh I thought I clicked on a Spooky Rice video but I guess sometimes a mistake can result in good things. Subbed

It seems like a changeling story where the parents know the child is strange from the very beginning. Ada isn't from the natural world, she's from the supernatural world. She's a fairy child, right? Her biological father is a fairy. (Or an elf, rather. I think in Iceland it's elves.) Elves are something that just happens to people sometimes whether they make good decisions or not. The Jesus parallels are very interesting! She is taken back into the supernatural world by her father following an execution, that's a Jesus thing too. Now I kinda want to watch this to see if I can solve the riddle.

This review has so many of my favorite elements of this channel that I watched it multiple times instead of watching the movie, which I would have watched had it not been for this review. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the film.

"We don't need to see another beautiful mountain" - Scaredy-Mil Cats-Dread, 2022

Hi. I teach English as a second language. I once used a curriculum that taught the kids how with nouns in English you put an 's' at the end to make them plural and for some reason they did this DURING THE FARM ANIMALS LESSON. Hearing you say 'sheeps' multiple times has caused me more fear than any of the films you talk about. Otherwise great vid.

The goat creature is literally the brother. Ada is the brothers child, had with the wife on a night he snuck onto the farm much like the night we find him, and finding out they are raising it he is disgusted, but ultimately cant kill ada. The dad ends up killing himself. The child is not actually a monster, just a familial monster, of which everyone but her knows the truth and it weighs on them so heavily.

Saw this movie and had more or less the same thoughts as you Mildred. I felt a little cheated, I ALSO like slow burn weird ass horror, and I thought for sure the movie was gonna bring it all home in the end and make it make sense. Maybe not literal sense, maybe very Lynchian sense, but some sort of sense. And it didn’t. Somebody somewhere said that the ending of a story is where you find out what kind of story you’ve got. It really seems true on many levels. It can tell you what genre you’re in (I maintain that while Stephen King’s short stories are a lot of times horror, most of his novel length stuff is more of a supernatural adventure story with high, fatal stakes. I think he honestly just grows too attached to his characters to let it all end badly, he always leans towards some sort of pyrrhic victory and pretty happy ending for the survivors, but I digress!), and ending can (and usually does) inform the quality of everything that came before it. Imagine if say, in Hereditary instead of the ending that film got, a bad GGI lamb guy showed up and shot the dad awhile Toni Collette mugged at the camera for a minute before the credits. Can we talk about how all the sharp moviemaking sensibilities went right out the fucking window with that ending too? The rest of the movie was creepy lingering shots, and not showing the monster but letting our imaginations do the work, and then that ending is just this shitty cgi lamb man with a gun shooting the dad. Not only did it not bring things together in any sorta way, but it was also just silly and badly done on its own, in a vacuum.

Open door could represent... lack of closure? Since there's a "trapped in the past" theme, maybe it's that? I kinda wish this wasn't horror. I honestly would have taken a sheep-girl slice of life movie about... idk her first day at school or moving to the city and want to return to nature. That would have been better.

The remake of Lamb Chop's Play-Along took a weird turn

i haven't been able to watch it yet sadly but as a disabled person i have been getting strong disability, birth defect, eugenics, changeling child vibes idk, i hope i can see it soon ETA: also something about infant death and trying to reclaim or replace the lost child pretty obviously, and don't open doors have history as imagery for the transience of death?

Not sure I have a clear read on this, but something that struck me is that so much of the movie is about categorizing Ada as human or animal and no one stops to consider that she is both - no one is actually honoring the physical reality of her being that they can see with their own eyes until another sheep/human comes along to trouble the categorization. She's not one thing or the other thing, she's this third thing, or at least exists outside the animal/human dichotomy. Like, when the beast is revealed to be a sheepman I went, "Oh! She's that!"

Very smarty-pantsed literary types are fond of talking about something called "negative capacity", which as best as I can summarize it is the ability to digest and ponder a story without coming to any definite conclusions about what it means, what's true or false within the narrative, and so on. From what I can gather, "Lamb" is, like, all the way that. It's all signifiers, and nothing signified. A study in uncanniness for uncanniness' sake. Like a ghost, it is ominous, insubstantial, and ungraspable. The capacity has been dialed down to -11, and allegories are for chumps.

@Jane-oz7pp

2 жыл бұрын

So kind of like the high-brow version of Rubber, acting as a commentary on the socially constructed need for meaning?

You're actually selling me on this movie. I want to be as confused as you seem to be.

Mkay, lemme take a shot. Just trying to sculpt a reading from this piece. This is a story about the fey. The fair folk. Spooky-ass primeval forces existing in lands untouched by humans, fucking with human lives and destinies in ways alien and mysterious to human norms and culture. This is a moody piece exploring what it would actually mean to raise a changeling. The quiet and slow pace highlighting the daily lives of these farmers, what feels alien to us is their daily norm. Same with the birth scene. Birth is...gross. It's also about as natural as life gets. We're all born, humans and animals both. Yet just the act of seeing it happen is enough to be violently offputting to basically every city person who didn't spend any time on a farm. The family are already living a life out of step with mainstay city life. And then some sylvan creature of primeval import gives them a changeling, a hybrid between fey and human. And central to all of these stories is that at some point, the changeling must chose between their human or their fey nature. The family lives on a remote farm, on the fringes of human society, an interstice between nature and civilization. From the brother's visit we get a sense of how fully urbanized humans would react to the changeling weirdness. The open doors highlighting how thin and ultimately permeable the human or "civilized" world is from nature...and the fey's designs. Then we've got the choice in animal. Sheep. A loaded animal metaphor. On the one hand, a herding beast largely non-violent that we've domesticated for thousands of years, often a symbol for being easily led or directed. Then we have the Christ imagery Mildred highlighted already: born on Christmas in a barn under miraculous circumstances, the lamb of god, blood of the lamb, etc. Then we've got a far older interpretation of the sheep. As a beast untethered by the world of man. A powerful, virile beast with horns and cunning that can violate man's control over the fundamental forces of the world: life and death. The biological father appearing not as some remote intangible spirit of Christendom, but as Pan. And for that significance, just read up on Pan; trust me, there's a lot there. The film ends in a Christian way, ostensibly. The father comes to reclaim the child and return them to a more natural world of spirit. However, this has verisimilitude with older Celtic/pagan myths highlighting other worlds and the ultimate powerlessness of man in the face of fey, vis-à-vis the face of nature. So an intentional syllogism is being drawn between a Christlike story of miraculous conception, dual nature, and ultimate ascension (which is also ultimately chaste and watered down by modern city-dwelling religious familiarity), and older stories of the fey messing with humans and creating children with some magical nature and unfortunate fate. Really, boiled down, it's all the same story. The human relationship to nature, or the world. Dress it up with spooky nature spirits or a distant immaterial god, it's all fables for people to give narrative to birth and death. I mean, maybe, I dunno. That's just what I got out of it.

@curlywhirlydirly1337

2 жыл бұрын

Dude, did you write this movie?

@curlywhirlydirly1337

2 жыл бұрын

No but really, that's a fantastic and well written read of the material. Sounds like the closest thing to sense I've seen in this whole comment section

@spehizle

2 жыл бұрын

@@enzomelo6131 I'm flattered you both think so, thank you!

i do really like that ada appears to have one hoof hand and one human hand, that's a cute character design element.

I loved the aesthetic and vibe of Lamb, and also thought the effects were simple but effective, but yelled WAT THE FU in my theatre at the ending. There were many other potential directions they could've taken the plot, and that was not the one I would've opted for.

Clarice you will tell me when those lambs stop screaming?

I remember seeing the original trailer, with The Beach Boys song, and thinking this was supposed to be some kind of black comedy. Then they made a new trailer that played up how it’s supposed to be scary. Wasn’t sure what to think. Edit: Maybe that’s the gimmick. Maybe Lamb is an elaborate shitpost that’s meant to emulate or parody an A24 movie, like you said.

@Tacklepig

2 жыл бұрын

Honestly, if that was the case, this movie is genius. I fucking LOVE shitpost movies that are genre parodies like that.

Hey, don't let this stop you getting Midsommar clicks! I like it when you talk about actually good movies. I'd guess Lamb has something to do with adultery and illegitimacy. The late child Ada was actually the brother's child, which Ingvar (the Joseph character) takes as his own, knowingly or unknowingly. Maria is the Virgin Mary, with her beautiful, kind, perfect, child who is also set apart by her origins. The movie plays out this conflict not with a human child, but with a symbolically lamb-headed child -- she is without sin. For reasons.

I have nothing useful to add, but your makeup is on point and these comments are fascinating

I love the comments here. I've never seen so many people with detailed explanations of completely different takes on what it means. Lots of people putting a lot of thought into it and coming to totally different conclusions. It's kind of beautiful. Also, makes me glad I haven't watched this.

The voice of Mildred calms my frazzled mind.

@DenethordeSade.90

2 жыл бұрын

As does sipping a poppy seed tea.

That shot of the sheep man holding up the gun that you keep showing is so fucking visceral

@ScaredyCatsTV

2 жыл бұрын

Really? I laughed out loud when they revealed it.

@UnaturalShadows

2 жыл бұрын

@@ScaredyCatsTV it's not scary but there's definitely a vibe emanating from it

I am enjoying the downward spiral of confusion more than I should. I’ve had this same reaction, but to films that are supposed to be understood more than I could manage.

I saw the trailer for this when I went to see The Green Knight, and the vibe I got from the trailer was that it was probably some kind of metaphor for self-centered grief and cruelty? And that it probably had some kind of Biblical/demonic overtone, because a child with the head of a lamb marries the innocence of the lamb and the child with the horror of What Should Not Be, as well as some visual similarity to demons as they're depicted in folklore; the visual of the little sheep girl scared me a little because she reminded me of depictions of Baphomet, and I'll bet her goat goblin father probably looks very similar to Baphomet. Either way, I think I will indeed need to watch it for myself.

@Jane-oz7pp

2 жыл бұрын

Not to poke too hard at your theory, but Baphomet is a modern invention and has no actual root in historic folklore or biblical lore.

@murphyleigh6319

2 жыл бұрын

@@Jane-oz7pp Fair enough! I feel like that doesn't change too much, since this is clearly an attempt at a modern sort of fairy-tale/parable, so it would pull from more modern fears and creations, especially if we *think* they're old, even if they aren't. Plus. Spooky guy with hooves and a goat head is spooky, even if he's a modern invention.

The best I could think of were the same things you said, except I thought it may have some origin in Nordic folklore? I looked it up, and nah, apparently this entire thing started out as like, a huge moodboard made from the creators' dream journal. In the same interview, this was said about the ending: - “Is he nature?” said Rapace. “Or the devil? Or karma? I mean, the [human characters] do take something that is not theirs to have. [Ada] doesn’t belong to them. We basically steal her and I shoot her mom! I think María knows that that happiness is a short chapter, that it’s borrowed time. That’s why she didn’t run after [Ada] - she knew that she had it coming somehow.” “I think a new chapter starts in her life,” said Rapace. “When Ada is gone and Ingvar dies in her arms, María still can find [the grit to know that] life will go on. There’s a decision to survive and to live.” - So yeah, basically just a hazy "we had something good, we tried to force happiness again, but we cannot control the wax and wane; nature continues and life marches on into the unknown weather" kinda thing

So I was super excited for this film, A24, Noomi Rapace, Iceland, these are a few of my favorite things…but in the end I think I mostly agree with you. I think that what happened here was that the creative team couldn’t quite agree on what the film was supposed to mean so they went with “makes ya wonder, doesn’t it??” which is…not my favorite. Like if you’re not gonna tell us the answer, at least be clear about the question. I think there’s a couple things you did miss, though, at least per my interpretation. The doors, to me, are a symbol of the boundary between nature and civilization, and then being open shows that the family are bad at maintaining that boundary. This is something that maybe doesn’t resonate with a lot of people today, but if you’ve ever raised livestock, particularly if you’ve raised them for meat, this boundary comes up every day. And if you are someone who likes to think of yourself as compassionate to animals, this boundary is a constant challenge to maintain. What is the difference between wild animals and livestock? What is the difference between livestock and pets? What is the difference between pets and people? The lines are blurry and arbitrary, so you have to draw the line yourself, and then it’s up to you not to cross it. And for a farmer that’s the difference between a decent living and a financial drain…or, I suppose one could suggest, worse... I think the lack of visual representations of the “darker side” of farm life makes a huge difference here. Even a single passing shot of some slaughtered sheep hanging by their legs, gutted and ready to be butchered, would have imbued the movie with a lot more meaning. As for the bestiality question…I think that’s what the movie was originally supposed to be about. I think that is (appropriately) the *horror* subtext that the filmmakers were trying to scare us with. You could see it, in a way, as the ultimate collapse of the aforementioned ‘boundaries.’ However, they seem to have decided it was too gross (or unrelatable?) and backed out partway through. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Icelandic government had a hand in this as well. These small, obscure European countries are often very touchy about their reputations, as one international film could easily be most of the world’s first and only impression of their people. They might not have Iceland to become internationally famous for being full of sheep-f*ckers, you know? (This also explains the focus on the beautiful landscape). Regardless of politics, in an attempt to back off that message, they scrambled the film and left it confusing and bland. Overall, a very pretty film, but perhaps not a smart one…nor, sadly, a particularly good one.

@TheShadowOfMars

2 жыл бұрын

This is the best answer to the door puzzle so far. While its fun to try uncovering the original intention of a work before the evil censors ruined it, I don't see signs of a cut zoophilia plot. That would mean the husband is "crossing the boundaries" by treating the ewe as a lover alongside his wife, and this turns the enmity between the wife and the ewe into a romantic rivalry instead of just competing for the role of mother to the lamb. (Although I guess the fact that the wife kills the ewe and then the ram kills the husband, can support a sexual jealously interpretation??) Methinks the sinful interspecies adoption is entirely sufficient to build a story about the disastrous breakdown of the human-animal line. What may have been cut is the "did you fuck a sheep?" conversation that Mildred complains about being missing from the script. That's a neat plot about mistaken assumptions, right? (A ewe gives birth to a half-human, and the human couple immediately adopt it; the audience and the husband's brother both logically conclude that the lamb is the husband's biological offspring, because that is obviously the best explanation for its human features and why they're treating it as their own child. But TWIST! It's actually the child of an unrelated humanoid monster and the adoption was completely due to the mother's unhealthy grief process! This is actually a story about denial, syke!) ...By cutting out the misdirection towards possible zoophilia, the section with the brother makes less sense, because he just irrationally hates the lamb for being a freakish hybrid. I can believe that there's a version where he incorrectly thinks it's his brother's abominable offspring and wants to destroy it to eradicate the sin.

Holy Carp, I love your reviews so much! I am not a "Horror Fan" by any stretch. But I really like the 'peripheral experience' of Horror. When scrolling through streaming services, I will always get hung up on finding random horror things, and then going into wiki-wanders around their production (I've learned SO MUCH about film-making, prop-making and the entertainment industry in general!). And I just dragged myself away from the "Lamb" entry to find this waiting for me. I still haven't seen the film. I don't expect to, but I truly appreciate the perspective you provide. For what it's worth, my opinion after reading the Wikipedia synopsis was: "What the hell? Why? What was that . . . .Why did they? . . . Ugh." You're great, keep being that.

I've loved this episode !! So funny and well written :D idk if i'm gonna ever watch this movie, but i'm glad you made this video to talk about it, it exists, even tho it's purpos is nebulous, and that's cool x) Because strange creations like that are, in my opinion, as good as great films. It provoks questions, and asking yourself why you didn't understand this but did understand that, why you didn't liked it, what's the hecking point ?! etc, helps construct our taste and knowledge of what we like in movies and why. So it's great that some people tryed to deliver a movie, there was an intention, but the execution seems to have been a miss... And it's ok, i hope they'll try again :) (Sorry for my english, i'm from france and just discovered you channel ! Lovin' it ! And may i add that your make-up up is super cute and i love your shirt ? Can't wait to see more of your videos !)

as an adopted person i feel like it's trying to say..... something?????? about the trauma and grief adoption brings, (the primary traumatized person being the adoptee who loses their entire connection to their birth family and then society tells them they are so special for being chosen when they question this despite it being more of a matter of being next in line to be purchased rather than "chosen", and the trauma of not knowing where you come from etc. etc., to keep things short on that front; the downplayed grief of birth mothers and birth family for having their children taken away-- did you know the majority of children given up for adoption have at least one surviving parent and very likely just as much birth family as anyone else and that adoption agencies etc. are not required to like. ask any of them if they'd want the child and that it is EXTREMELY common for birth mothers to be coerced into giving up their children in some way? adoption is a multi-billion dollar per year industry in the US alone and like. almost completely unregulated and done primarily behind closed doors; continuing on to the third part of the adoption triad, adopters due to infertility quite often are given no grief counseling or anything and told that adoption will "fix" the "problem" of not having any children and will be "just as good" for them as having their own genetic children, sweeping the grief of infertility under the rug and never letting them truly process it in favour of using a child to keep up the appearance of your average heterosexual family. there's also stuff about transracial adoption but i'm not a TRA (transracial adoptee, tho i am also a Trans Right Advocate considering my transness, i suppose LMFAO) so i don't feel entirely qualified to speak there atm especially not having seen the film) (as an adoptee i have a very very hard time parsing the feeling i get when i look into the mirror and seeing pieces of people i have never known, maybe that's part of the whole mirror thing? also the term "genetic mirroring" is used a lot in adoptee spaces on twitter, maybe that's part of the whole mirror thing?) i'd have to actually see the movie to piece anythign together but it looks. kind of triggering to me given my personal lot in life LOL but i would be interested when i'm in a better headspace. sorry if this is unclear and rambly LOL i think i'm missing a lot of the subtext of the movie since i'm just lookng at it through this video but i'm very interested in it and it wouldn't surprise me at all to know that one of the writers or something was adopted? additionally, i will say that sheep on farms are frequently artificially inseminated and that them helping birth sheeps could be seen as like, forcing the cogs of the adoption machine, the excitement that something has "gone wrong" for the mother sheep that can benefit them, rather than "loving animals" in film language which would be much more obvious on a second watch than the first i believe. i would be EXTREMELY interested to see a second analysis of this movie if you familiarized yourself with the adoptee rights movement, a perusal of the 'beingadoptedmeans' hashtag on twitter is actually a pretty great place to get started of all the hellsites in the world LOL

I was looking down at the comments as the video started and when I glanced up at the video I audibly gasped 😳 your makeup ❤💯

I use the metaphor of the "Lamb child" motif in a book I am writing. I've always found it mysterious and intriguing. Also, I've associated it with a particular character who is FtM, and the symbolism of a lamb growing up into a ram, and his proper character having a ram motif is just delicious. A literal actual lamb child, as it turns out, is actually pretty funny though.

@finngswan3732

2 жыл бұрын

Lol, nice! Any title to keep an eye out for?

@ThrottleKitty

2 жыл бұрын

@@finngswan3732 The working title is Liminal Beyond, it'll be pretty close to that. His character also has a m/m asexual romance. He's not the only representation present either!

@blarg2429

2 жыл бұрын

@@ThrottleKitty 👀

My biggest problem with this film was that none of the icelandic lore was explained at all. Which meant that the character reactions made zero sense. Afterwards I realized that the characters knew what was happening the whole time because they recognized what the creature was from the beginning. They also knew they shouldn't take it because the monster at the end was going to come back for it. So their reactions were reasonable to an icelandic audience who know what the monster is. Not sure if that clears anything up but I guess maybe it means you can't recover from your own grief by stealing the happiness of others? Or something-something environmentalism?? Animals are people too and we shouldn't use them for our own selfish reasons or else daddy nature will get revenge? Idk man.

@sofiasoderstrand3094

2 жыл бұрын

But why tho? Like ok, don't let the faye in, that's fine as lore. But it doesn't feel like it's exploiting anything beyond "If you take the faye in, they'll come and get it back" but if you're not exploring the folklore in any meaningful way, then what's the point? Atleast if they made a slasher horror, the journey would be worth it. But now it just seem to say "nah the goat will shoot you, you know, because it's the fay"

@devforfun5618

2 жыл бұрын

@@sofiasoderstrand3094 that fact that he uses a gun, instead of magic or a more fantasy weapon like a sword or knife makes it funny, you dont expect the satyr to use a gun, maybe a blow darth

@sofiasoderstrand3094

2 жыл бұрын

@@devforfun5618 i feel you could tell that joke in less than 2 hours

@melaustin3305

2 жыл бұрын

@@sofiasoderstrand3094 Yeah- I mean, maaaaaybe it's a magical-realism way to say exploiting nature is bad even if you're doing it for food, to recover from grief, or in a loving way? Honestly, I don't think the director really intended to explore a theme. They just had a short story with no real point or plot they wanted to tell and really, I think it might've actually worked as a short. If everything that happened was compressed into 20-30 minutes, it might not have needed to mean anything.

your makeup looks so pretty! I like the color scheme!

God even just based on your synopsis of things I know EXACTLY how you're feeling. The symbols are all there, it's clearly ABOUT something, but I can't put them together.

I think you’re overlooking how irresponsible Maria and Ingvar are as parents. It’s implied their first child died because of their negligence and they regularly overlook Ada’s wellbeing - they get drunk while she’s just left to wander the house (and out of it, given that they never close the damn doors), they feed her lasagne made with lamb, they essentially raise her to fill their first child’s role, regardless of what’s best for Ada and what she herself wants. As other people have pointed out, the film has a lot to say about entitlement, but it’s worth noting the resulting complacency Maria and Ingvar feel about the most important thing in their life, even after already losing one child! I think selective empathy is also a really important theme. Pétur initially treats Ada like an animal and, while that does change, he still views Maria like an object. Ingvar and Maria treat Ada with empathy but only because she looks like them, before she can even properly communicate, while Ada’s biomum, despite being clearly wracked with grief, is killed because she’s just an irritating sheep. I think the last shot (heh) is Lamb essentially daring the audience to empathise with the Ram-creature. We empathise with Ada and we empathise with the humans despite their flaws - does that extend to this? Do you care about the monster’s feelings and desires? Etc. etc. (Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch but I’ll double down and say I think that Lamb is also criticising our tendency to value the past over the present, to focus on nostalgia while overlooking what we and others need now. Sjón, Lamb’s writer, also co-wrote The Northman, which went hard on the anti-conservative angle too.) I think the two biggest errors with Lamb are how oblique it is and that it was framed as a horror film. It took a half an hour conversation with my partner for us to feel like we knew what the film wanted to say and, while I enjoyed the film a lot, that was far more as a low-key, brooding, emotional family drama than a horror. Similar to The Green Knight vibe.

You know as much as the creators, they have no idea what this movie was supposed to mean either, they are just happy it is so pretty and malleable. The ending was improv. Everyone talks about Icelandic mythology, but when the director was asked he went into this whole thing about dreams and the interviewer asked, "so it's from a dream?" “Yeah, it could be,” said Jóhannsson. “People are always asking me where it started and I have no idea.” And what does the ending mean? Is it some deep, subtle truth that only reveals itself through hours of zen meditation? Maybe, but if so, it doesn't seem like anyone, including the *creators* did that. The ending was improvised: *What should we take away from the ending?* “I think everyone should decide for themselves,” said Jóhannsson. “It was interesting, when we shot that ending we didn’t really decide what was going to happen,” said Rapace. “I came running up that hill ... and then we did various shots and takes. For me, I think it’s that life is beautiful somehow. Our willpower and our determination to stand up again and to keep on going is so strong and I think that for me in a strange way there’s hope in the ending. A painful hope.” *Where does Ada’s father take her and what is he?* “I don’t know where they live, but he can stand for so many things,” said Jóhannsson. “Is he nature?” said Rapace. (Actress who played the wife, Maria.) “Or the devil? Or karma? I mean, the [human characters] do take something that is not theirs to have. [Ada] doesn’t belong to them. We basically steal her and I shoot her mom! I think María knows that that happiness is a short chapter, that it’s borrowed time. That’s why she didn’t run after [Ada] - she knew that she had it coming somehow.” The LA Times had the balls to call *this* meandering stroll of an interview, "Lamb ending explained: Creators answer lingering questions". (Subtitle: Exactly what is going on in ‘Lamb’? The director and star unpack the wild Icelandic fable). www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-10-08/lamb-ending-explained-noomi-rapace-valdimar-johannsson So, Ada's father could be their neighbor Bob, he's not a mythical figure, just another guy who lives the next farm over and has a rifle, like everyone, you know for wolves and stuff. The couple knew it was probably him that fucked one of their sheep, because Bob is the only humanoid sheep in the area. The dramatic tension was in ignoring that their neighbor fucked one of their sheep because it would be too impolite to bring up, so they just raise the kid as their own. Bob really loved that momma sheep but it would also be impolite to admit that he fucked her and he'd just feel wrong buying her from the neighbor couple. When he realizes they have killed the wooly love of his life, that blood debt supercedes the social politeness contract and Bob can then kill the husband and reclaim his daughter and the whole situation is then resolved, with no one needing to talk about it, which is why the wife is just kind of relieved at that moment. The lesson is, "Two lives are a small price to pay for avoiding an awkward conversation."

Best recommendation for this movie I could've gotten. Though that 'smarter than me' part might be a breaking point

I just saw this in a theater and the director was there for Q&A it was so awkward. I wanted to leave but I was near the front and not a lot of people where there so I felt like I had to stay to be polite. all the sheep birth and tagging stuff is real cause this was filmed at a real sheep farm it all basically means nothing according to the director it's about a ram man who fucks sheep. he was mad that they stole his kid and killed his girlfriend or whatever.

@RobertKnutzen

Жыл бұрын

like they mostly seem like a couple of rich weirdos who wanted to make a movie. they love all the meaning people see in it. but they never explained what THEY were saying so I think he just wanted to film a ram man killing someone and he liked living on a farm for the months it took to film

Oooooooooooooooookay. I have seen a few movies like that. I get all the way to the end, then... Nothing. Thanks for saving me the hour plus I would have wasted on ultimate frustration.

Holding onto the past is exactly like adopting a lamb baby.

From my guess, one possible interpretation is the double edged sword of putting so much empathy on an animal that we see them in human terms, and not purely respecting for their own distinct attributes. Like how the caretakers of Koko the sign language gorilla was given basically a human diet and wound up living her final years overweight and diabetic (something, last I checked, that doesn’t tend to happen to gorillas even in captivity). Or we look at an animal we think of as smiling, when depending on the species the sides of the mouth turned up and/or showing teeth can mean very different things, like fear or aggression. Here, they feel such a paternal instinct towards a newborn animal, that they (either through some sort of magic or delusion) literally anthropomorphize her, making her a surrogate for their lost human child and rip her away from her actual family. Just stretched out with way too many A24 ‘slow dramatic walk through mist’ long shots.

It could be the open door symbolises that Ada is torn between 2 worlds, the human and anima/natural world and that she is in the human world but the animal/natrual world is still calling to her. If you want to take it a metaphore for closed/secret adoption it could symblosie that adopted children are often torn between curiosity for their biological parents and their origins but also their adoptive parents and the adoptive parents fear that finding their biological parents will result in the child leaving with the biological parents. This fear then results in hiding a childs adoption status or biological family from the child (shooting the sheep mum) and the child feeling there is something different about them (being half sheep) then resenting the adoptive parents when they find out they are adopted resutling in the child leaving the adoptive parents to go to the biological parents

Peter almost murders his lamb-niece?! WTF, PETER!

oh heck, your makeup is outstanding in this one (even more than usual!)

6:18 reminds me of an episode of _Frankie Drake Mysteries_ I watched a couple years ago. For those not in the know, the show takes place in the 1920s, and the episode in question revolved around a movie set. It was blatantly apparent the people who made the episode put zero effort into recapturing the look of film from that era beyond desaturating digital video. As a huge fan of silent era cinema, it pissed me off more than it probably should've.

Mildred your eye make up game is absolutely fantastic! I am inspired

It's being haunted by old dangerous things. And the door is the opening between the present and that dangerous (sheepman) past.

by best guess is- its about how being adopted just as a replacement for the previous child effect ada. being a replacement becomes so integral to her identity that when inevitably removed from the context of her parents she undergoes a loss of self. its not so much nature reclaiming her as it is the reality that she is not the previous ada

I appreciate this video. I had so many of these thoughts. thank you.

I saw this movie in theaters, right after watching Dune in IMAX, while still peaking on about 250 micrograms of LSD. Normally that makes the meaning of movies like this clearer, but beyond a thematic connection between the human tendency to accept new, even horrible, situations to avoid dealing with trauma to the blind form of community associated with herds, this one escaped me (I can't even tell you what it was trying to say about that connection or why the rest of the story is the way it is). Enjoyed the hell out of it but probably just because I was on acid and ready to see some wild inexplicable shit.

This Key Jangling thing you mention sounds like a fun time. I'll try that out. Thanks Mildew.

I knew I was about to have a good time at, "That's the question _Lamb_ sets out to answer! And it doesn't!"

I thought it was going to be a decent folk horror from the trailer but one of my pet peeves about folk horror, much as I love it, is the way things can be left so vague you have no idea why any of it was happening and sometimes even no idea what was happening. I don't need everything spoon feeding to me but I do like to have a satisfying conclusion rather than "just because" leaving a load of symbolism and plot points that I can't even guess at what they meant. I could guess at things in, for example, "A Field in England" and while I still have questions they're not frustrating. Is it even folk horror though? It fits some of the definitions but it seems like it misses a lot more.

Bereaved parents are told that we should let go of our child who died. The end of this movie - Ada/lamb being taken away - seems to fit in with this messaging. To me Ada/lamb represents how we still have to "parent" our dead child, but not in a way we want to. I am still his mother even though he is dead. Learning how to love & care for Ada/lamb reminds me of how I struggled to maintain a connection to my son when the world kept (and keeps) telling me to LET GO and MOVE ON. But grief comes from love and why would we let that part go, ever? The brother/uncle is a family member who is also feeling grief for his niece and is uncomfortable being around bereaved parents (that part is very familiar) and wants them to just 'be normal' and go back to how things were (his feelings for his sister-in-law) before the child died. I don't know if the movie covers this but how did the original Ada die? How old was she? How long ago was it? Did she die at birth and that's why we get the lamb birthing scenes, especially where the couple are in shock at one of the births? The long shots make me thing of the endlessness of longing for the child you can't have with you, only in memory. It is endless and boring and annoying and weirdly also sometimes beautiful, but in a disturbing kind of way. I don't know if a bereaved parent was involved in the making of this movie but I'd be interested to find out. I never want to see this movie and I kind of wish I hadn't seen this video. Maybe the annoyance and discomfort on display is actually your feelings about the fact that children die and parents are forever sad about it. Who wants to sit with those feelings? Nobody.

Loving the eye look in this video. Eyeliner is so good but also love the color combo 👍

I’m guessing they were attempting to duplicate the creep factor and hidden meaning in David Lynch’s Erasurehead.

Oh man your makeup looks great!!

The fact that there are so many people in this comments section very confidently declaring wildly different interpretations is probably the best evidence that the movie is confusing and it's not just you.