Icelandic Horror Tale ‘Lamb’ – The Hollywood Reporter

It was 4 within the morning when Noomi Rapace bought referred to as from her trailer to stay her arm up a sheep.

“They woke me up and mentioned ‘it’s taking place! The child’s coming!’,” Rapace recollects. “I mainly put my palms up the mama sheep and pulled out the newborn.”

Not a daily day on the workplace for Rapace. The Swedish actor, launched to international prominence as Lisbeth Salander within the unique The Woman With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), is extra accustomed to Hollywood backlots and franchise tentpoles — her post-Dragon Tattoo profession contains roles in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, starring alongside Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock Holmes: A Sport of Shadows and along with John Krasinski within the Amazon Prime collection Jack Ryan.

So what satisfied one among Europe’s largest stars to shoot a low-budget style movie — Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Cannes Un Sure Regard entry Lamb — in rural Iceland?

“Valdimar didn’t actually pitch me the mission. He can’t lie and he’s very shy. So he simply got here to my home in London, gave me script, a lookbook and a e-book of Icelandic poems,” says Rapace. “However as quickly as he left, I referred to as my staff and mentioned: ‘I’m doing this it doesn’t matter what.’ There was no cash however my entire spirit simply instructed me, you’ve bought to do that, it spoke on to me.”

In Lamb, Rapace stars with Icelandic actor Hilmir Snaer Gudnason (White Night time Marriage ceremony) as a childless couple tending to a herd of sheep in a distant farm. In the future they uncover a mysterious new child on their land, which they determine to boost as their very own. However within the custom of the darkest Nordic folktales, their option to defy the legal guidelines of nature will carry chaos and destruction.

“In Iceland, so most of the tales, the folktales are nature-driven as a result of that’s what persons are afraid of, and if you’re afraid, you think about one thing on the market,” says Jóhannsson. “The darkish rocks turn into trolls, the panorama turns into threatening.”

“I knew this story someway. I grew up on a farm in Iceland. The way in which I used to be introduced up, I lived very near life and demise,” says Rapace. “Watching my dad and mom ship child lambs after which seeing at slaughter time while you kill the lambs and eat the meat. For me it felt like going again to my roots.”

The worldwide teaser for Lamb — A24 picked up the movie for the U.S. forward of its Cannes premiere — contrasts the gorgeous pure fantastic thing about rural Iceland with a way of impending doom. One thing— an unseen drive at the hours of darkness outdoors — looms ever nearer.

“We use the previous folklore manner of telling our story, very merely and really clear,” says Rapace. “And I believe additionally very Icelandic. Folks don’t converse loads and there’s a calmness even in essentially the most brutal conditions. It’s not straight-up horror. It’s extra psychologically and inside.”

“For me, this movie is about loss and the way a lot this couple is keen to do to attempt to recapture the happiness that they had earlier than, to make their life bearable,” says Jóhannsson.

Making Lamb has additionally been, for Rapace, a type of rebirth.

“I’ve been on this loopy journey. I left Sweden after The Woman with the Dragon Tattoo and I divorced my husband that very same 12 months. My life modified loads,” she says. “I got here from quite a lot of trauma and quite a lot of chaos. Since then I’ve been rebuilding myself. Now coming again to Iceland and capturing this film, all of it comes full circle. It was very emotional for me.

With out sounding too cliché, it’s made me need to reconnect to my roots, to the place I come from, and do to extra European cinema, to possibly do much less motion and extra inside drama.”