One of the clumsiest things I think a film can do is rely on exposition to give the audience information, rather than having that information revealed naturally through character action. If you want to establish that two people have a difficult relationship, convey that through their body language, how they say things, and what goes unsaid. Don’t open their dialogue with “well, you know we have a difficult relationship” apropos of nothing. Nobody talks like that. It’s stagey, artificial. This is where the phrase “show, don’t tell” comes from. It’s conventional wisdom that it’s better to build character through action and feeling than just telling us stuff outright. And I tend to agree.
But on that score, The Other Lamb is a really weird beast. It’s a really stylish film that manages to be both oblique, relying a lot on showing over telling, but also obvious in ways that telling usually is.
We open on two young women - Selah and Tamar - sitting in front of a waterfall. They’re wearing matching blue dresses, their hair in identical braids. Selah tries to scare Tamar, and they laugh. When they return home, it’s to a small encampment of trailers and cabins in the woods. The community keeps waterfowl - geese or ducks - and sheep. They build fires, dye their own clothes. The two young women gather with the rest of the community for dinner. It’s maybe nine or ten women, ranging from middle age to little girls, and one man, whom they call “The Shepherd.” He refers to them as his “flock,” as his “wives” and “daughters.”
They thank him for “his grace.” They wait for his permission to eat.
Daughters wear blue, wives wear red.
This film is Selah’s story. Her mother was part of “the flock,” and apparently died giving birth to Selah. Selah was born into this life, among the wives and daughters, watched over by The Shepherd, he and he alone who has given them grace. He who brings women, “broken and searching,” into the fold and gives them shelter. He who chooses wives from among the daughters. And Selah’s getting to that age where she’s starting to question the ways of the flock. The newest wife, Eloise, is Selah’s age and just joined the flock. Why was she chosen over Selah? Why are some wives sequestered from the flock in a tiny windowless cabin, fed on leftover scraps? She’s feeling a complicated mix of uncertainty and inchoate resentment. This is all she’s ever known, but it’s starting to make less sense.
And that’s…well, that’s kind of the movie, right there. The IMDB blurb is “A girl born into an all-female cult led by a man in their compound begins to question his teachings and her own reality.” And…yeah. That’s it. This film does exactly what it says on the tin, and that’s sort of the problem - that’s really all there is to it, and there aren’t really any surprises. Not that I wanted or expected a Shyamalan-esque “twist” or anything, but it also doesn’t really have a lot of depth to it. It’s not a bad story to tell, but almost everything plays out in the most obvious way possible, at least in terms of what’s happening and why it’s happening. The strange tension I experienced when I watched this film was between the triteness of the story and the manner in which it’s told.
To its credit, the film mostly stays away from straight exposition. Much of the story is told using discrete images, alternating between the action in the present day and more expressionistic inserts that communicate Selah’s internal emotional state without being tethered in reality. Which is certainly fine and can be an effective narrative tool, but the imagery feels obvious to the point of cliché - of course they keep sheep, because sheep symbolize unquestioning followers, routinely slaughtered as a matter of utility. Of course Selah imagines herself screaming silently, because that’s how you know someone’s real feelings are being suppressed. Of course Selah imagines herself a typical teenager in a station wagon, because that’s how you know she’s wondering what her life would be like outside of this cult. And of course the Shepherd is the shepherd and refers to his followers as his flock, because they’re sheep - GET IT?
Symbolic imagery works by using images that directly evoke emotion, they don’t have to be literal. Here a lot of it is just one step away from literal. Like, if Selah had just imagined herself walking away from the flock, that wouldn’t be out of place here. And few of the characters have much of an inner life, but it doesn’t seem like it’s because they’re denied one by The Shepherd, they just…kind of exist to the extent they need to to tell the story. Selah asks one of the shunned wives why she doesn’t just leave the flock if she feels so unhappy, and all the shunned wife can say in return is “maybe…I am…afraid.” Well, NO SHIT. That’s all we get. That’s our character development. A woman who has spent the better part of her life in an abusive cult doesn’t want to leave because she’s afraid. That’s a fleeting glimpse into the obvious. The specifics of the cult aren’t anything especially nuanced or insightful either - just lots of throwing around ideas of “impurity” and “grace” and “rebirth,” stock ideas you can find in any story about any cult based on Christianity. The Shepherd himself isn’t really developed beyond “manipulative dude who likes having a bunch of women to use as he sees fit.” There’s not much depth to the dynamic between him and his followers in either direction - no real sense of what brought these women to him (other than the offhand description of them being “broken and searching” toward the beginning) or what about him keeps them there.
It also doesn’t help that the acting tends toward wooden - no, that’s not fair. I don’t think it’s the acting per se so much as the dialogue, which is mannered to the point that it feels like outtakes from The VVitch, even though this takes place in the modern day (broadly defined, it could be anytime between the 90s and now from the couple of glimpses of cars that we get). Selah is pretty well-portrayed, at least at the outset, as someone whose feelings are in conflict - this is the only life she’s ever known, and there are things she hates and resents about it even though she can’t put words to it, and that’s pretty well-conveyed. The Shepherd isn’t overplayed, and as the film goes on you can see the layers of paternalistic benevolence eroding to expose the capricious cruelty and need for total control underneath, and there are some bits here and there where the need and desperation for approval that his followers feel are communicated vividly, but the dialogue is on some “we must not have these thoughts, for they are forbidden” and “we are fasting because we are impure” shit like you’d get from, I dunno, a Criminal Minds episode about exactly this kind of cult. Like, I’ve watched my share of documentaries about people in cults, and people in cults only talk like this on television or in movies. It’s cartoonish, and deeply at odds with evident filmmaking skill in other areas.
Because yeah, on a technical level, this is a really well-made film. It’s gorgeously composed - contrasting the color of the women’s dresses against largely drab forests and heaths, the way a single figure or person will be placed in medium to close shots at the center of the frame most of the time to draw our attention, then pitting that kind of close composition against broad rural vistas, but doesn’t do a lot with that visual skill. It’s paced incredibly slowly - it’s only a little over 90 minutes but feels at least half again that, and that can work if it builds up to something, but slow burns work because there’s a burn at all, and this film is so detached for most of its running time that by the time there is some sort of escalation or revelation or payoff, the impact is largely dulled by how long it took to get there and how little happened along the way. There’s a difference between telling a story and revealing things through small gestures that signify something larger and just having everything be small gestures.
This isn’t as much a horror film as a dark character study, but I think for that to work, you need a couple of things that aren’t really in sufficient supply here - first, you need the darkness to be palpable. You need an atmosphere that feels oppressive, you need to feel the grip the Shepherd has on his “flock,” and this film occasionally falls prey to telling over showing on that front when it moves away from Selah’s direct experience, and the slow pacing and emotional remoteness dull that feeling of oppressiveness. It’s not totally absent, and certainly the opening of the film does a really good job of introducing us to this world and these people in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable without being overly expository, but it doesn’t hold onto that as the film goes on.
Second, you need to have an idea of the character of whom this is a study. If this is a story about Selah coming to question her upbringing and trying to break free of it, then I think the film would be better served by spending more time with Selah as she actually is and letting that conflict through more and more gradually, rather than leaning on symbolic cutaways to tell us “Selah is having doubts” and “Selah is very angry.” It’s employed more judiciously than, say, nightmare sequences in the average horror film, but it still takes us away from her as a person and makes it all more of an abstraction, which a lot of the women in this film are already close to being. Which is itself a legitimate choice for this kind of story, insofar as the “wives” and “daughters” are functionally interchangeable to the Shepherd, but it also makes it harder for us to get invested, and as a film largely absent of the kind of spectacle you get in horror films, you need something to invest your audience. The result is lovely to look at, but lacks nuance or fresh insight. It shows us a lot, but none of it tells us anything new.
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