![]() ![]() If the picture does meander a little in its middle sections, it encounters complete redemption with a satisfactorily unambiguous denouement. In different circumstances, this Shepherd could be the least interesting crackpot in the saloon bar. Huisman wisely dials down the malevolence to create a demon of dull charisma. Kelly Campbell and Denise Gough, both experienced performers, stand out among the domestic performers. The cult was all Selah knew-until one day she begins to question its leader and the insular world she was born into in this haunting vision of a nightmarish. Cassidy deserves much praise, but this is an ensemble piece and the circling cast complement her beautifully. The camera never gets overexcited.Ī series of apocalyptic visions pile on suffocating tension as Selah works her way towards an inevitable crisis. CS McMullen’s script is raw and skeletal. The Polish director, who won Jury Grand Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for the excellent Mug, is more dedicated to creating a fully fleshed out - if slightly fantastic - world than tweaking the genre’s established conventions. The philosophies play to attitudes common in wider society for millennia. The Shepherd follows the playbook for a hundred real-life criminal misogynists. There is, to be honest, not a great deal that is new in the cult’s philosophies. Cult horror following a cloistered all-female religious group led by one man (Michiel Huisman, Game of Thrones) and questioned by one of the young devotees (. The film is, thankfully, not explicit, but the intricacies of family relations are horribly clear from the opening frames. The women do, indeed, tend to flocks, but Selah, moving towards womanhood, is also threatened with becoming the latest lamb to the Shepherd’s sexual slaughter. The reference to lambs in the title is both literal and metaphorical. The increasingly impressive Raffey Cassidy, standout in both Vox Lux and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, stars as Selah, a teenager who knows no life other than that of the religious, patriarchal cult run by the Shepherd (Game of Thrones alumnus Michiel Huisman). This is not a film designed to shake off late-Covid unease. But the atmosphere of frontier decay and misogynistic oppression is sufficiently well maintained to sustain attention throughout. Malgorzata Szumowska's addition to the genre - an Irish co-production from Subotica Films - is at the more austere end of the cult-movie spectrum (we mean movies about cults, but The Other Lamb could end up satisfying both definitions of that phrase). (If you wish to archly append The Passion of the Christ list then I can’t stop you.) The Wicker Man, Holy Smoke, The Master, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Midsommar: we’ve had everything from folk horror to thoughtful indie puzzler. ![]() It says something about the human animal’s need to follow that so many great filmmakers have tackled the subject of the devotional cult. ![]()
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