‘Lamb’ Trailer: Noomi Rapace Raises A Sheep Child In A24’s New Horror Movie
The 2021 Cannes Film Festival is now underway, and one of the films playing this year in the Un Certain Regard section isLamb, an Icelandic thriller starringNoomi Rapaceas the (adoptive?) mother of a half-human, half-sheep child. You heard that right. The film is set to premiere at the festival on July 13 but indie-horror distributorA24has already acquired the North American rights and now we have a look at the first international teaser.
Lamb Trailer
Variety(viaBloody Disgusting) reports that A24 has scooped up the stateside rights toLamb,which is directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson and co-written by Jóhannsson and the mononymousSjón.The film looks to be something of a pastoral three-hander, with Rapace and Icelandic actorsHilmir Snaer GudnasonandBjörn Hlynur Haraldssonbeing the only faces glimpsed in the teaser. Variety gives the following plot outline:
The A24 Brand and Its Spooky Trailers
Rapace made a name for herself in 2009 when she starred as Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish version ofThe Girl with the Dragon Tattooand its two sequels. It’s been 10 years now since she had her international breakthrough with her first English-speaking role inSherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. In the blockbuster realm, she is still perhaps best known for playing Elizabeth Shaw in Ridley Scott’sPrometheus. That film andits teaser trailer, soundtracked by the production music company Audiomachine, are a prime example of a movie where the marketing hype almost eclipsed the actual viewing experience.
In the past, A24 has also suffered from this problem, with trailers for some of its movies playing up the thrilling aspect of them in a way that belied their true slow-burn nature.It Comes at Nightnotably received a “D” CinemaScore after its trailer sold it as a monster movie. Spoiler alert:it’s not.
The Witchis another example that comes to mind of an A24 horror film that was critically lauded but that general audiences didn’t seem to find particularly scary.Lambtakes a page fromThe Witchin that it also centers on a family isolated on a remote farm, with rolling green hills and white sheep substituted for the dark forest and a talking goat named Black Philip (who wants you to “live deliciously”). It’s almost impossible, actually, to hear the sheep “bah” at the beginning of this teaser and not think of Black Phillip.
By now, with a few more years of horror releases under its belt, viewers should be better attuned tothe A24 brand, which brings an arthouse sensibility to the genre, couching it more in simmering psychodrama than jump scares. The teaser forLambdoes an effective job of building a creeping sense of dread that seems more in line with what audiences have come to expect from the studio.
