First-time director Valdimar Jóhannsson has created something strikingly odd with his auspicious debut feature, Lamb, a part-creature feature, part-ruminant relationship drama about a pair of grieving parents who adopt a half-lamb, half-human baby. At times darkly funny – the human-lamb hybrid child has that effect – but played throughout as deadpan serious by its minimalist cast (led by the always impressive Noomi Rapace of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acclaim), Lamb is a thought-provoking curio that begs questions about humankind’s need to command the natural world and their own lesser urges – and their inability to do so. Jóhannsson’s vision is strange but singular, adopted in kind by the exact studio that genre-defying fare like this ought to be adopted by, A24, though I remain unconvinced that it necessarily adds up to the kind of menacing profundity intended.

Stuck in the far-flung fjörds of Iceland, Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and Maria (Rapace) live a quiet, destitute life of sheep farming. From what early glimpses we’re provided, their marriage is a partnership devoid of warmth, as windswept and vacant as the fjördlands that cinematographer Eli Arenson photographs to underscore the sense of isolation and human smallness that haunts this film. Their interactions are limited to passing the baton of who is on sheep duty that moment as the duo quietly work in shifts. Stuck in the humdrum patten of surviving in this barren outcrop.

Their marital strain percolates in their every awkward interaction. Busying themselves with work, Ingvar and Maria avoid the gaping nothingness of their union. You can almost smell some obscured loss that lies at the center of this troubled relationship and the script, working from a screenplay co-written by Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, revels in the atmospheric tension of so many words unspoken. But springtime calls and the promise of renewed life hums. The pair tends to their growing flock, pulling lamb from ewe in unblinking, medically-accurate moments of farmland lambing. As in, Rapace is actually participating in a lamb’s birth onscreen, blood, maternal material, and all. It’s gross.

When one such lamb turns out to be partially human, their world isn’t turned upside so much as right side up. They take the baby in as their own. They provide the creature with children’s clothes and the crib that lay collecting dust in their farmhouse. The youngling (lovingly named ‘Ada’) fills the gap that had laid them bare. When Ingvar’s dirtbag brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, the only one human to appear in the film) lays witness to the creature, he asks in a state of shock, “What the fuck is this?” Ingvar claims simply, “Happiness,” and his answer is as genuine as is it simple.

The mind naturally drifts to the uneasy implications. The unholy matrimony that may have occurred in the midnight midst of this lonely marriage. But Lamb never once invokes the idea that Ingvar got promiscuous with an ewe and is better for it. Jóhannsson’s feature instead tempts us with the promise of something more sinister, the eerie score from Þórarinn Guðnason playing on the inherent discomfort of this unnatural occurrence, promising some kind of reckoning that will undoubtedly come to fruition.

As Pétur inserts himself in the situation, an equally unnatural love triangle boils to the surface and Lamb tucks into the material horrors of a marriage gone horrible askant. The darkness of it all is tempered by Ada’s innocent and weirdly adorable presence, achieved through a convincing-enough amalgam of CGI and puppetry. Ada remains a beacon of innocence as the grown-up figures above her battle their way through personal trials, big and small.

Taken as a whole, Lamb offers a uniquely haunting and emotionally solvent mystery but it feels a bit more like an appetizer than a main course. The abrupt ending leaves the viewer feeling unbalanced but also somewhat unfulfilled. Our bouche is amused, our curiosity titillated, but the poetic sparseness of Lamb leaves the viewer trapped in the makings of a minor work, lingering in the shadow of some superior narrative bellow. The implication of man’s failure to tame nature is a salient through-line and Jóhannsson balances this idea with amplifying instances of the animal kingdom trying – and failing – to reclaim some sense of agency: the birth mother of the lamb-baby is a recurring figure, until Maria decides that the sheep’s bleating cries for its offspring is just too obnoxious to take.

Jóhannsson’s story concludes with the WTF moment it had carefully, sneakily been building towards all along but cuts to credits before we’ve had time to settle what it’s supposed to mean and how the relationships at the center of the story have truly gained and suffered from the impropriety of seizing what may never have been theirs in the first place. It wouldn’t be entirely fair to claim the final shocking moment comes from left field, since Lamb is a story served up from left field in its entirety, but, like the little lamb that arrived to change Maria and Ingvar’s life for better or for worse, the bizarre gods of this fucked-up fable giveth and taketh away. For the human characters herein, hubris encourages them to pull the wool over their own eyes – to mock nature and twist its will to their own devices. So too does Lamb pull its own wool over our eyes. If only there were more meat.

CONCLUSION: A24’s unsettling and atmospheric horror-hybrid incites an unholy matrimony of humankind’s domination of the natural world and their need to belong within it. Peculiar, menacing, and strongly-acted, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s ‘Lamb’ is an off-kilter fairy tale that fascinates and frustrates but remains steadily committed to its brand of odd-duck pathos.