I was originally going to save this one for the end of the week since it seemed like it was going to be the weirdest of the ones I was going to watch. Then I thought I’d follow up Moloch with this since they’re both Scandinavian films. Then I realized that the Netherlands isn’t actually a Scandinavian country and at this point I just gave up and said “Fuck it” and just put it on because that’s what I was in the mood for.

Ingvar and Maria run a little farm in the middle of nowhere in Iceland. Which is most of Iceland, to be fair. They have a simple life together until they are helping one of their sheep give birth and it births a sheep/human hybrid. The couple decide that the only course of action when a sheep gives birth to a child with a human body and lamb head is to adopt it and raise it as their own child. Surely whatever it was that impregnated the sheep with this creature wont be angry and you can live your life in calm assurance that nobody will ever care you have a genetic impossibility for a kid.

The plot summary there is fairly short but that’s because this movie is almost entirely devoid of plot in the traditional sense. There isn’t a lot of action in this film. There isn’t a lot of dialogue in this film. It takes almost 10 minutes before our main characters utter a single word. Frankly, there isn’t a lot of anything in this movie aside from some really well done CGI splicing for Ada, the name of the titular lamb. It isn’t boring, per se, as the cinematography is top notch and the acting has you believing the actions of this couple in an otherwise unbelievable story. Unfortunately, the movie has maybe two scenes of tension that are then almost immediately resolved and don’t impact the rest of the story.

I would be hard pressed to actually call this folk horror. I would be hard pressed to call this horror at all. This is more surreal slice-of-life than anything else. The ending has a little bit of the feel of a horror movie but it is otherwise completely devoid of anything scary and doesn’t even have the atmospheric spookiness that you would hope would replace outright scares in something like this. I’d say this is much closer to a fairy tale than anything else. I appreciate that the movie does a lot of showing not telling where the couple not being shown to talk much at first and then becoming more chatty when Ada shows up gives a good indicator of a strained relationship without beating you over the head. When they happen to have a crib in the barn and some child clothes and blankets already even though they don’t have a kid, you also understand what might have caused that tension and why they are so ready to adopt this mutant.

It’s a movie that is good at telling a story. It’s just that the story isn’t horror and whoever decided to put it in that category is really stretching the definition.

Score: 3 out of 5 (on a horror scale. Would probably be closer to a 4 if you didn’t go in expecting a horror movie)