Selah never knew her mother. She’s never known what it was like to go to school or see a movie or play on a playground. All she knows is all she’s ever known: the sisters. The mothers. The sheep. The Shepherd.
She knows the Shepherd is her father, of course. In a way, as leader of their small flock, he is all of their fathers, either spiritually or, in her case, literally. He is the father of every good thing. And in gratitude and duty and love, they feed him. They groom him. When the Shepherd beckons to one of his wives, they come without question. And when the girls and women go to bed at night, they pray to him.
Come down upon me and fill me with yourself. Help me feel closer to you.
Sometimes, he preaches—cutting the throat of a lamb as preface, spilling the warm, rich blood into a cup.
“I took every one of you in,” he says. “I’ve protected you. I sacrificed my life for you. I gave you shelter, I gave you daughters, and sisterhood. And life.” And then as the women and girls chant and pray and plead, the Shepherd smears their faces with the lamb’s blood—a blessing, perhaps. And those whom he passes by feel the lack of the Shepherd’s grace keenly.
Selah, still a girl, has always felt her father’s grace and love. “So beautiful,” the Shepherd says as he strokes her cheek, plays with her hair. “Just like your mother.” She loves him, too. She believes in him. For her, this is home. The Shepherd’s blue-clad daughters are her sisters, his purple-wearing wives are her mothers … even if some of those mothers are just the same age as she is.
But then one day—the day after the Shepherd receives a mysterious visit from a strange man, driving a vehicle with red-and-blue lights on the roof—the Shepherd announces they must leave their home in the woods, to push on to another promised land. Otherwise, he warns, “The outside world will destroy us all and take you away from me.”
And so they begin a journey through forest and glen and windswept moor, searching for another home, away from a world that the Shepherd tells them is broken and filled with broken things. Only in their family are things perfect: They are how god, how the Shepherd designed them to be. He is theirs. They are his.
And he will use them however he likes.
We’re obviously talking about a cult here, and this one seems pretty messed up even by cult standards. But we find some real affection here, too.
While we see hints of rivalry amongst the wives and daughters, many care deeply about, and at times fiercely for, each other. For instance, we see Selah and a girl named Tamar pal around and, at times, act very much like BFFs would anywhere. Many of the Shepherd’s youngest daughters look up to Selah.
Selah, meanwhile, eventually finds her own woman to look up to, as well: the “Cursed Wife” who lives (pre-move) in a shack and cares for menstruating women. (Menstruation, in the cult’s theology, is a punishment visited upon women, both representing the sin of Eve and a lack of faith on the part of the woman experiencing her period.) The Cursed Wife—one of the first members of the cult (along with Selah’s mother) gives Selah insight into how messed up this environment really is. And when the Shepherd wants to kill a baby, she decides to take it and leave the cult, even though she’s terrified of the outside world.
“You are so strong,” she tells Selah. “Promise me you’ll remember that. And help your sisters to remember, too.” And while the ways that this strength eventually manifests itself is problematic too, the sentiment is accurate.
The cult, while obviously not Christian, certainly takes a few cues from Judeo-Christian tradition. The Shepherd clearly wants his followers to think of him as a Christ-like figure, and he refers to the place they’re traveling to as a new Eden. The fact that the Shepherd sacrifices lambs, while clearly an idea lifted from Scripture (though other religions sacrificed lambs, too), it seems intended to emphasize his power over his own flock rather than any sort of cleansing offering.
Sex with the Shepherd takes on the character of a solemn rite … at least in how the women talk about it afterwards. “He just kept telling me, ‘You are perfect, and you are accepted,’” one woman tells Selah. “In that moment everything was perfect. And I knew I never wanted to leave.”
We hear the women sing the traditional American hymn “Good Old Way” (a song that has lots of other names, including “Down to the Valley to Pray”) during a funeral. As mentioned, the women and girls appear to pray to the Shepherd, thanking him for, among other things, his “grace” and “love” and for the “beautiful day” they had.
The Shepherd baptizes the women and girls in a lake—both an act of cleansing, it would seem (one says “I feel different” after the ceremony), but also as another way to emphasize his power over them. (He holds some of the girls under water longer than others, thus showing how dependent on his “grace” they all are.)
[Spoiler Warning] The Shepherd’s baptisms, in the end, take the symbolism of “death to new life” in a horrifying direction. He drowns all of his current wives (off-camera) in an act that he characterizes for their daughters as a “miracle,” saying that they went to find new life elsewhere. Now that his current wives are dead, their daughters—his daughters—are free to become his wives.
The Shepherd bases his cult on polygamy and incest. And if anyone has a problem with it, they dare not speak up. We clearly see, from the movie’s first stages, that the Shepherd is attracted to Selah, even before she begins menstruating. Selah knows that once her periods begin, the Shepherd could and likely will take the next step with her. As Selah shelters with the Cursed Wife, Sarah, during her first period, the girl seems to linger after her menstruation has stopped—fearing what might be waiting for her when she rejoins the larger community.
“You know you can’t stay with me here forever,” Sarah tells her. “He counts the days. He knows our private rhythms.”
We see the Shepherd engage in sexual acts with several girls and women. Sometimes we see acts of foreplay through Selah’s eyes, as she spies on him and his current paramour. (He often stares back at her.) The acts themselves are often quick and disturbing, including the repeated acting of gagging the women by putting his fingers in their mouths during sex.
We see scenes of an unclothed woman beside a waterfall, and she’s visible from the front, sides and back. In the baptism sequence, women wear white garments that, when wet, leave nothing to the imagination.
We’ve got some difficult acts of violence to get to, but they give away some stuff, and we’ll move those behind a spoiler warning. In the meantime, we still have plenty to talk about.
Selah is assigned to watch over the sheep as they give birth. One of the ewes births a lamb without any wool or, possibly, any skin. It’s still alive, and it tries to lift its head. Later, we learn (and see) that Selah killed the thing with a knife, sending blood splattering across her face. (We see the misshapen lamb several times in Selah’s own memories and dreams.) She later lies and says that a “wild dog” killed it.)
The Shepherd repeatedly kicks one of his daughters, then slaps her twice in her face. “Worthless,” he says, as he physically drags her across broken, root-and-stone infested ground. A woman gives birth, but she dies in the process. Her body is laid upon a funeral pyre, and the Shepherd roughly pulls the woman’s other daughter away from the body and almost throws the girl to the other women. (We see the pyre set alight, but not before one of the women blames the Shepherd—using his given name the only time we hear it in the movie—for her death.)
We learn that Selah’s mother didn’t die in childbirth, as Selah had always been told, but via infection several days later. (The Shepherd refused to take her to the hospital, calling the infection a spiritual test.) One woman darkly gives voice to a mostly unspoken truth: The Shepherd’s flock is utterly devoid of boys. “Only one lamb in the flock, child,” she says, suggesting that any other male children were left to die or killed. We see several scenes involving Selah’s menstrual blood, which appears to (depending on context) emphasize womanhood or the violence yet to come.
A dead lamb lies beside a bowl filled with its blood. The Shepherd cuts the throat of a lamb on camera. Skinned sheep carcasses hang from a building. Selah sees a dead bird whose body is writhing with worms. We see several images of women underwater—ethereal and unsettling in equal measure. But it becomes far more unsettling once we understand the full context.
[Spoiler Warning] As I mentioned earlier, the Shepherd drowns his wives. We see their purple dresses strewn about the edge of the lake water (where the deed was done) and see an apparent flashback to a woman struggling with the Shepherd underwater while a corpse of another woman floats above them both. Later, the bodies of the women are found in a reedy bog.
That proves to be the last straw. He slaps another female, too, who then slaps him back. While the movie juggles the chronology a bit, the Shepherd is then attacked by his daughters (his face and their faces are both bloodied, echoing the rite mentioned in spiritual content), and one appears to bite off his ear. (She spits it away.) His head is apparently then crushed by a rock. Later, police find his naked, bloodied body tied to two trees. (The scene is short and far away, so you don’t see anything critical.)
One f-word and one s-word.
None.
Selah vomits behind a tree.
The Other Lamb is classified as a horror movie. But this is far different from the typical horror flick filled with ghosts or serial killers, where audience members shout, “Don’t go in there!” It’s meant, it seems, to be treated as art, not entertainment; and as such, perhaps Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska is encouraging viewers to see the movie as a critique of cultural patriarchy or religious control.
But while Szumowska might think the film is art or a cultural statement or whatnot, the end product falls short—and the critique we’re given is muddy indeed. It’s not thoughtful enough to be an important film. It’s not scary enough to be a fright flick. What it winds up being is so much sexualized, gory glop that falls short on all fronts.
I don’t think I need to recount the movie’s myriad issues here—the nudity, the blood, the incest, the dead sheep. While it’s not without some aesthetic merit, it stumbles on its own entrails as it slumps along. I know we’re all looking for something new to watch during this strange and frightening time. But when it comes to the Other Lamb, I’d recommend turning the other way.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
