![]() ![]() ![]() Instead, the film becomes a series of incomplete dreamy gestures, a Cliff’s Notes study on patriarchal supremacy and religious fanaticism with an entirely unearned optimism-fitting for our girlboss era. The Other Lamb doesn’t work as horror either-its visual language is too self-obsessed, too cloying, and too derivative to be truly unsettlingly or even basically scary. McMullen are not willing to examine white supremacist modes of gendered oppression but instead would prefer to seal their world off in order to accomodate a limited vision. It appears that Szumowska and screenwriter C.S. If we’re supposed to believe that this cult exists in the modern U.S., which one sequence of passersby in a station wagon seems to suggest, then the token black wife depiction falls suspiciously flat. As it turns out, the Shepherd is a quietly ruthless misogynist and abuser, but he’s happy to have one black wife, and as a result, a black daughter, who we never see him pick on or belittle directly. A charismatic man referred to by his flock as Shepherd is leading his all-female acolytes on foot as they search for a. One of the wives is black, and like a few of the other wives, we never hear a word from her, except during a group song during a funeral. There’s a scene in Magorzata Szumowska’s dark, stomach-churning, brilliant drama The Other Lamb that perfectly encapsulates the life-on-the-outside longing of being born into a cult. In this way, the film fulfills an increasingly common liberal impulse with period or cult movies: an incomplete revisionism with perhaps a bit of tokenistic racial diversity to shake up its feminism-lite approach. But Selah, a daughter, can’t be a wife… or can she? That’s the primary tension the film offers, but by leaning heavily on psychological illegibility as a kind of aesthetic, themes of incest, misogyny, and domestic violence are sublimated into a coming-of-age story where horror is rendered relentlessly ethereal. According to the film’s logic, the Shepherd finds his wives in the modern world, lost souls yearning for safety, salvation, food, shelter, and ordered life with scripts and dogma ripe for the picking-typical cult stuff. The adolescent and devout Selah (Raffey Cassidy), worships her Shepherd, ostensibly her father and also her crush. Bordering horror and psychological thriller, the film meanders through a crisp aesthetic, first seducing the viewer into the remote and idealized country lives of the Shepherd ( Game of Thrones’ Michiel Huisman), his red-frocked “wives,” and blue-frocked “daughters.” The film loses its grip as it becomes more apparent that its ideas, and not only its characters, are debilitated by a sealed-off worldview. ![]() Cults are fertile ground for exploring gender dynamics in a vacuum, and so The Other Lamb, helmed by Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska, is perfectly fitted to the conditions of insularity. ![]()
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