“It’s experimental”. “It’s cerebral”. “It’s philosophical”. Defining the very vogueish art-horror sub-genre is a tricky business, not least because the tell-tale tropes and features can easily apply to the broader genre. Still, one knows an art-horror – or at least what critics will call an art-horror – when one sees one. The Witch and Midsommar are obvious examples, as is this debut feature from Valdimar Jóhannsson.
The opening sequence of the director’s darkly enchanting new film recalls the indecipherable swirls of Snowstorm, steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, a painting for which JMW Turner was reportedly tied to the mast of a ship, during a storm, for four hours. In the blinding white of a wintry Icelandic tableau – a coup for cinematographer Eli Arenson – distant shapes are finally, squintingly discerned as a herd of galloping horses. Some unknown, heavily-breathing thing has spooked the animals.
It’s the first of many unseen things lurking about this intriguing fairytale. In common with Thumbelina and Sondheim’s Into the Woods, this odd fable concerns a childless couple. Struggling sheep farmers María (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason), have already lost an infant when, one day, during the lambing season, a ewe delivers offspring with the body of a child and the head of a sheep.
Ada, as she’s called by her adoring adoptive human parents, gives Ingvar’s nomadic brother Pétar a fright when he arrives unexpectedly at the farmstead. But he, too, is finally charmed by the good-natured, hybrid ruminant.
Pétar’s drinking and his clumsy sexual advances against María create discord in the home, but – even for a drama about a child with a sheep’s head – there are already disconcerting subplots. The treatment of Ada’s biological mother doubles as a troubling account of surrogacy and speciesism, two very modern ethical issues buried within the mythological framework.
And something, somewhere, continues to frighten the livestock and the dog.
Rapace is wonderful, conveying both tenderness and desperate maternal instinct, in a performance that couldn’t be further from her hardened turns in the Millennium Trilogy. The script, co-written by Jóhannsson and former Sugarcube Sjón (who also co-authored Robert Eggers’ incoming The Northman), is both lean and consistently surprising. The wild conceit is, against all odds, through smart writing and clever use of CGI and puppets, made palatable. The denouement is pleasingly shocking.
