Lamb - a suggestive organic horror hybrid from Iceland

It's Christmas Eve

night and someone / something growls and puffs themselves out in the snowstorm in the barren Icelandic countryside.

A brutal presence that makes a herd of horses flee, which reaches a small lonely farm where it enters the sheepfold and scares the animals, and we hear a sheep screaming in pain.

After that start, you sit on standby in the cinema chair, and just want more of the same kind.

And it will.

But first we land with Ingvar and Maria (Noomi Rapace), the owners of the said sheep farm, a childless couple struggling, who have taken care of their chores on the farm for so long that they no longer seem to need to communicate in words.

Looks and body language say it all and also suggest a sadness that put them in this mental stand by mode.

But one day they still get a boost, of an odd woolly kind.

The genre film has

not directly stood as a rod in the Nordic repertoire.

In a way, it's understandable: Why try to compete with Hollywood on their safest home turf?

It is also expensive, with all the attans computerized special effects (cgi) needed to make it fantastically believable.

But in recent years, they have still started to roll in, the Nordic genre films, partly because the cgi has become cheaper - and that we have been recognized as good at tinkering with the megapixels.

But they come as a kind of horror hybrid, "folk fear" is probably the right term, which has at least one foot left in drama land.

Like Swedish

, Norwegian

, Icelandic

and now this semi-horror ice cream like many other national comrades leans heavily towards folklore and the mythology of the old days.

And the imposing

landscape, of course.

When it comes to image work, Icelanders are fraudulently privileged;

it's basically just to pop up a camera and the barren, powerful nature stands for the rest.

Oh well.

Almost.

And the dynamic soundscape does its thing, it's sparse with mood music, but every now and then, when it's hot on the screen, great sounds come from a grinding steelworks.

Nature and animals play the main role (those who want to study good sheep directing have a lot to gain here) but also Swedish Noomi Rapace makes a talented contribution.

She usually plays a barren figure, but here it actually seeps out a little emotion as well, you can see the soft under the hard.

Despite its lowliness, it is one of Rapace's best efforts in a long time.

Lamb is original

in the cinematic fingertips and the aesthetics are a slap in the face, but so is the directorial director Valdimar Jóhannsson, an experienced photographer and special effects maker.

Jóhannsson's screenplay partner is the acclaimed author and poet Sjón (who also wrote the slasher film

) who contributes a bit of dry humor in the middle of the nasty things, and delivers the final sentence as a snazzy organic ear file.

It is about man's selfish view of nature, about how we always put ourselves before flora and fauna, and what huge consequences it can have.

In the big and in the small… lamb.