In recent years, non-fiction cinema has begun to shift away from the traditional anthropomorphic representations of animals on screen. Recently, Elizabeth Lo’s Stray presented the lives of street dogs in Turkey from a uniquely canine perspective. Advances in technology like the GoPro have enabled filmmakers to get closer to their subjects than ever before, allowing for intimate and empathetic portraits like Lo’s. But could there be another factor at the heart of this shift in focus from the human characteristics we’ve forced upon animals? It’s not hard to draw connections between the release of films like Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda and Andrea Arnold’s Cow with the fact that many of us are reconsidering our relationship with the meat and dairy industries.
Of course, this current cinematic trend has its antecedents. Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar inverted anthropomorphic representations by projecting the titular donkey’s ordeal onto the humans around him. The cruelty and degradation Balthazar endures is echoed in how Marie, the only one of his owners to truly care for him, is repeatedly mistreated by the men around her. Like Balthazar, Marie’s father is eventually worked to death with no reward. Bresson’s film presents a protagonist without agency, subject to the whims of mankind. One particularly affecting scene presents Balthazar in a circus, cutting from the eyes of the donkey to the eyes of a tiger and finally to the eyes of an elephant. These species are miles apart from each other but are connected by their oppression at the hands of man.
Interspecies connectivity is at the heart of Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature Lamb. Like Gunda and Au Hasard Balthazar it too is rooted in the rural, but these roots merely allow for something more unsettling to grow. This isn’t a Bressonian realist parable, it’s a chilly and unnerving folktale. Lamb is the story of María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), a childless couple who discover a half-lamb, half-human hybrid on their isolated Icelandic farm. They decide to raise the child, who they name Ada, as their own with devastating results.
Though Jóhannsson refutes suggestions that Lamb is a horror movie, horrifying scenes bookend the film — the monster’s eye view and heavy breathing of the opening scenes and the terrifying creature that rears its head at the climax. Aside from these moments, the film plays out as a small-scale domestic drama, albeit with a palpable sense of the uncanny. In unquestioningly accepting Ada as their own, the couple act like empty nesters whose pets become surrogate children. They dress her in human clothes, watch television, and pick flowers with her, whilst the natural order prowls the outskirts of their domestic bliss.
In scenes that parallel the devastating climax of Gunda, Ada’s biological mother paces the land outside María and Ingvar’s home, calling out for her child. Enraged by this, María leads the ewe away from the farm and shoots her. It viscerally demonstrates how desperate she is to keep hold of her new child. When we later discover that María and Ingvar had a daughter who died, it becomes clear that in her desire to become a mother again, Maria has been as cruel to the ewe as fate was to her. Lamb is an emotionally sparse film, so it’s never clear whether María understands this herself, or if she even feels empathy for the ewe.
María’s empathy, or lack thereof, is a metaphor for the dichotomy between our anthropomorphised understanding of animals and our own carnivorous nature. Nowhere is this more obvious than in commercial cinema. It doesn’t matter that the actor James Cromwell was inspired to go vegan by making it, audiences have no issue separating Babe from their bacon sandwich. They can do this in the same way that families can wolf down hotdogs whilst a cartoon pig sings and dances on the big screen during Sing 2. It’s only a movie, pigs don’t really talk. This cognitive dissonance is challenged when cinema subverts anthropomorphism to create empathy rather than enforce human-centric ideals. For example, Gunda’s unflinching portrayal of a mother who is traumatically separated from her offspring is as emotionally resonant for parents as it is for those who were once lost and frightened children.
There is a similar moment for Ingvar’s brother in Lamb. Disturbed by what he finds on the farm, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) takes Ada into the early morning mist, intending to kill this unnatural hybrid. As he looks into her eyes, he realises he can’t do it. She’s a child. It doesn’t impact his diet, however, or that of María and Ingvar, who continue to eat chops and drink milk, unable or unwilling to draw the connections. Meat and dairy are commodities to which they are entitled, thanks to their lifestyle and prime position in the food chain. It’s this entitlement that leads them to tear Ada away from her biological mother and anthropomorphise her as their own daughter.
María and Ingvar’s actions are indicative of humanity’s parasitic relationship with nature. How much can you take from the natural world before it takes a stand against you? In the film’s climax, nature hits back against the couple, brutally and abruptly. The judgement that is meted out to María and Ingvar is almost straight out of the Old Testament, there’s no ritual, no burning wicker men or human sacrifices. Their punishment reflects the crime committed, it’s an eye for an eye, and Maria is left more alone than ever before. As a grieving mother who’s projected her idealised fantasy of a daughter onto Ada, she can hardly be surprised when the lamb’s very real, and very vengeful father returns for her. Jóhannsson’s own family background — his grandparents were sheep farmers — is what lends the film a tangible sense of verisimilitude. It’s therefore unsurprising that Lamb occupies a space between the burgeoning animal-centric trends in non-fiction cinema and arthouse drama. There is clearly a subversive anthropomorphism emerging. A way to humanise animals that doesn’t reduce them to cute comedy characters but one that directly confronts our commonality with other species, and the ways in which we do them considerable harm.
