The Other Lamb Takes Us on a Gorgeous, Gory Hero’s Journey
The so-called “Shepherd” sends Selah (Raffey Cassidy) to the hills to deliver a newborn lamb. Instead, she returns with blood-stained hands and the wrath of an almost anthropomorphic ram, who—for the rest of The Other Lamb—follows her around, breathing heavily, angry horns in her face and stony eyes challenging hers.
The horror of The Other Lamb accrues slowly. Director Malgorzata Szumowska is a master of world building; the film is told through cult member Selah’s perspective, with the cult leader, the “Shepherd” (Michiel Huisman), existing as a more-or-less silent and cruel specter. Initially, the followers believe that only the male leader has the right to tell stories, but The Other Lamb skewers the male gaze.
In the film, to see is to know—and to surveil. The leader organizes his all-women cult into two horrifying categories: Those who wear red frocks are forced to be his “wives” and the ones wearing blue are his “daughters,” many of whom, if not all, are his biological daughters (Szumowska obscures some of these details). He knows everyone’s menstrual cycles, and he seems to always be lurking, trying to pluck the next daughter from childhood and make her his wife as soon as she begins her period. His favorite daughter, the pious Selah, however, begins to perceive his insidiousness and grows fearsome of the impending arrival of her period.
Szumowska’s film reflects on the power, and politics, of looking. The compound the cult lives in was built panoptically, with large, open windows so the leader can cast a watchful eye on his followers; his eye, in turn, enforces his will, dividing his followers so they are encouraged to report others’ behavior to him to win his favor. He kicks and maims his least favorite daughter, Tamar (Ailbhe Cowley), and rapes castaway wife Sarah (Denise Gough), who is exiled to live in a shed and tend to those who are on their periods. Cinematographer Michal Englert’s camera follows Selah’s inquisitive gaze, counteracting the leader’s surveillance by observing what, it seems, she’s not supposed to: She stays up late and watches the leader’s house, and the wives who populate it.
Often, she finds the leader looking at her, his image typically obscured by a shadowy light or a muddy window so she can only perceive his eerie outline. The threat of his gaze lingers regardless of whether he is actually watching or not. It is through Selah’s observations that she is able to turn the leader’s gaze on its head and detect the violence below the surface. She makes sense of the hellish cult through her meticulous looking, but also via mysterious visions—or perhaps revelations—of her own that seem to predict the future.
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