Cordero (Lamb) is a difficult movie to sell to the public. On the one hand, it can easily fall into the categorization of a horror film in which a couple receives the “blessing” of a second chance with a daughter who comes from a sheep. The little girl in question is a hybrid between a lamb and a human. On the other hand, and less flashy for the marketing department, it is a family drama with touches of a folktale.
Maria and Ingvar are a couple who live on a remote farm in Iceland in what could be an ideal location for an Instagram account of beautiful Nordic settings. However, this is not so. Director Valdimar Jóhannsson presents us with a scenario far from being idyllic and more realistic. Fog, cold, rain predominate and the loneliness of both characters seems to be underlined especially, who suffered the loss of their baby Ada.
One of the first dialogues occurs when Ingvar talks about the possibility of traveling in time and going into the future. For her part, Maria sees no problem staying in the present. This conversation subtly delineates where our protagonists are: on the one hand, the man wants to leave the pain behind in order not to feel it anymore. While for Maria, she is aware that she must live through Ada’s absence, her grief is real and her grief is present, there is nothing wrong with not feeling.
The monotony that Jóhannsson presents on this farm correctly reflects human grief. In those moments, nothing seems to advance nor allows us to leave our pain behind. However, all this changes when a sheep gives birth to a hybrid being between a lamb and a human, in the purest style of The fly, but the 1958 version with Vincent Price and not the one with Jeff Goldblum.
Quickly María and Ingvar ‘adopt’ this girl whom they call Ada. Yes, like his dead daughter. And that’s where everything seems to go perfectly, but we know that in a story of this type, not everything could be that simple. Noomi Rapace achieves an interpretation that is completely different from what she has done in other productions such as the trilogy Millenium The Prometheus -where paradoxically she acts as a surrogate mother for a new kind of Xenomorph-. Here his María is a complex character, but she does not need dialogue to show her pain and hope, she does all of this from silences.
It is interesting to observe how a film with a character like Ada, half a girl and half lamb, addresses a classic theme such as the mourning of having lost a baby. This new opportunity, seen through a cinematography closer to us (understand a Mexican or Latin American film), would have resulted in a more traditional drama, a linear one with a human baby, that would not generate interest in the public for something like proposed by Jóhannsson and Noomi Rapace -who also serves as producer-.
The first trailer from Cordero It was introduced by the A24 distributor a few months ago and it quickly hooked the public thanks to how exotic it was to see Noomi Rapace with a little lamb dressed in girl’s clothes. While the romantic Beach Boys song “God Only Knows”, Reflects the feeling our protagonists have: ‘Only God knows what would become of me without you’.
Cordero It is a film that touches on edges about parenthood, grief, the need to move on and our relationship with nature. Likewise, it is a second chance to be able to love, although we do not know what separates us, ‘only God knows’ …
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Sergio Lopez Aguirre Stanley Kubrick once said “To have a broader vision, not only see good movies, but also the bad ones” obviously I listened to him in the second and it is very funny.
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Lamb – Film Review with Noomi Rapace | Cinema PREMIERE