![]() It took a while for me to figure out the time period. The movie is the English-language debut of the Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska, whose work is so powerfully dislocating that The Other Lamb seems less like a pale retread of The Handmaid’s Tale than a primordial dream play, set in an era before people could read or write. Given all the godly males who’ve been steering their flocks toward certain doom, misandry is more than ever a survival instinct. Although The Other Lamb is heavy-handed in every conceivable way and a few ways you’d never have conceived of, it has a special resonance in the spring of 2020. Stuff you might have once laughed off seems soul-shattering. ![]() It makes for a different viewing experience, I’ll say that. You have to fume alone or with someone who - no matter how much you love him or her - could very well bring about your death. So not-a-mystery it’s hard to imagine a large audience watching nearly two hours of Sela’s crisis of faith ( Is Shepherd a good shepherd or a bad shepherd?) and not screaming: What’s wrong with you, woman? But as luck would have it, you can’t see The Other Lamb with a large audience, not at this juncture. Not much of a mystery, the nature of Shepherd’s divinity. Sela sees herself underwater, clothes diaphanously swirling: Is she being reborn, as Shepherd has promised his cult? Or is she struggling to keep from being drowned? One daughter, Sela (Raffey Cassidy), quivering on the brink of womanhood, feels his eyes eating her up and has visions of birth, death, and menstruation - baby lambs denuded of flesh, birds secreting maggots, a ram with markedly horny horns. Shepherd is so full of grace that there’s no need for any other male on the premises. They drink in his sermons on the cruelty of the outside world say, “Thank you, Shepherd, for allowing us to be your wives” and tend to the blue-clad “daughters” who’ll one day - post-puberty but not too post - receive Shepherd’s grace for themselves. Day after day, she and her sister wives (dressed head to toe in red) compete for Shepherd’s attention. The chosen one will certainly receive Shepherd’s grace - i.e., his membrum virile - because that’s why she’s there. In the surreal subjugation film The Other Lamb, a Jesus-esque kind of guy who answers to the name “Shepherd” slowly walks around his circle of wives (they’ve just eaten and sung hymns of praise), squats beside one, and whispers, “Will you receive my grace?” The question is pro forma, actually. Given all the godly males who’ve been steering their flocks toward certain doom, the film has a special resonance in the spring of 2020. ![]()
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