Female Film Critics 24/375
Stylish, intense, and thought-provoking, Malgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb is both a gripping coming-of-age story and a dark, disturbing fable about a community of women who find the necessary strength to push back against and escape from a stifling patriarchy that dictates everything about their behavior and expectations in life.
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Director Malgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb is a visually striking, quietly poetic but very bleak tale about an all-female cult living in a remote, dense forest. The women tend to real sheep as well as to their Charles Manson-like leader (Michiel Huisman, who seems a bit young to have fathered girls who appear older than tweens) who is known only as “The Shepherd.”
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As the audience knows from the off and as Selah comes to realize, this is ultimately a familiar earthbound story of one man’s heinous abuse of power, and the danger of blind faith. And while Selah’s journey to realization and empowerment may not hold many narrative surprises, it’s nevertheless one that commands attention. Powerful performances and a commanding aesthetic make this an arresting watch.
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The Other Lamb, the English-language debut of Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska feels like the fevered dream of a menstruating teen handmaid, if she were, say, “Of Donald.” It provokes the sort of disgust and repulsion we are experiencing on a daily basis when we watch the daily “press briefings”, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
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There is a palpable anger at patriarchal institutions that bleeds from Catherine S. McMullen’s pen as much as it does through Szumowska’s camera as they unpack the precise mechanics of dominance and submission, and how such abuses can become naturalized and institutionalized until stepping back and asking ‘why?’ becomes a radical act in its own right.
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Opening May 22, AWFJ’s Movie of the Week is Tomorrowland, Disney’s family adventure in which a science-obsessed young girl discovers the existence of a secret futuristic world that exists somewhere in time and space and that may hold the fate of humankind.
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