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THE OTHER LAMB
Director: Malgorzata Szumowska Cast: Raffey Cassidy, Michiel Huisman, Denise Gough, Eve Connolly, Kelly Campbell, Ailbhe Cowley, Isabelle Connolly, Irene Kelleher MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:37 Release Date: 4/3/20 (digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 2, 2020 A person only knows what they see, hear, and experience, and for Selah (Raffey Cassidy), that is only the life of a cult, isolated from the rest of society. The Other Lamb gets inside this character's head, as she learns that this life of hers can hardly be called a life. It's a haunting film, filled with jumps in time and into Selah's headspace, because director Malgorzata Szumowska never wants us to feel as complacent as the character does at the start. Selah is one of many daughters of a man known only to most of his followers as the Shepherd (Michiel Huisman), who has positioned himself as a deity incarnate. His wives and daughters, who exclusively make up the rest of the group, pray to him before they eat and sleep. In his presence, they are completely subordinate to him, pleading for atonement for sins that only the Shepherd knows, because he invented them. Selah clearly is one of the Shepherd's favorites, and as our observations of her place within the cult continue, we get the idea that he has other things in mind for her. She hides her first period from him, because he deems women at that time of the month to be "unclean," and when she fails to properly oversee the birth of a sacrificial lamb (She actually kills the deformed newborn, claiming an attack by a wild dog, lest it serve as a symbol of her own failure), he forgives her. The plot within C.S. McMullen's screenplay is scarce, seeing the cult removed from their commune in the woods and traveling the wilderness to look for a new home. The point, though, is that we understand how Selah is both physically and psychologically trapped within this community, run by a twisted man whose sense of control over these women and girls becomes more and more depraved. With the help of Sarah (Denise Gough), now an outcast, Selah starts to see her father for the monster he can be, has been, and is. Admittedly, there isn't much depth to the story, which only has Selah learning things we know from the start, but The Other Lamb certainly compensates for that with Szumowska's command of the moody, claustrophobic atmosphere. The film accomplishes what it sets out to do—to put us in the mindset of an imprisoned young woman, deciding that she needs to escape. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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