Unquiet
Things

A24 had a one-night-only screening of LAMB last night, and since I am still not comfortable with going to the theatre, I had myself a fancy in-home theatre experience. Like every other movie that I have watched since late February 2020.

Are you guys going back to the movies yet? What are you doing to ease your fears about the experience of being out and about among others? I should note that I am not out and about doing much of anything yet. A few doctor’s appointments and the occasional grocery excursion, and two outside, open-air restaurant experiences over the course of 8 months, but that’s about it. I feel like if I weren’t living in FL, I might be a little more into it, but…nah. These people are insane, and I don’t want to risk it. So home movies it is!

I’m not sure what to say about LAMB just yet. If you’ve seen the trailer, and have decided to watch it, then I imagine you already have a grasp on what’s going on. To an extent. On the surface, it’s a simple, slow-moving story: a married couple, Maria and Ingvmar, are eking out a rather joyless existence on a remote farm somewhere in Iceland. You get the sense–though it’s never mentioned–they’ve experienced a loss. A profound sadness has taken root as resignation, and this is a couple just going through the motions, a daily life steeped in ennui. Until one day they bear witness to a strange miracle, and they accept this gift as their own. I am not sure it was meant to be taken as such, or taken at all.

I read a review in which LAMB is described as folkloric psychodrama and “chamber horror,” if you can consider this film horror at all. I believe this is a film meant to be unsettling, but as another reviewer remarks “…indeed, the most disturbing thing is how non-disturbing it ultimately becomes.”

The Icelandic scenery, the towering mountains and bleak, foggy skies, is somber and beautiful and this rural folktale almost seems like a love letter to nature, if you discount the fascinating and baffling story occurring at the heart of it.

I still don’t know what to make of LAMB, though to be fair it’s been less than 12 hours since I saw it, so I’ll sit with it a while longer. But I doubt I will come to any easy conclusions.

On a less weird (or MORE weird?) note…did you know that A24 sells scented candles in their shop? Your home theatre can be fragranced with the aromas of Horror, Noir, Thriller, or Fantasy, just to name a few! I won’t lie, I am kind of into this.

Horror, pictured here, includes notes of mandarin, clove leaf, cypress, suede, and cinnamon bark, and is inspired by “fangs, glowing eyes, remote lakeside cabins, foreboding shadows on walls, bloody knives, low-angle staircase shots, dilapidated houses silhouetted on a hill, and black cats.”

And finally, earlier this month, Nuri McBride over at the Death/Scent blog, for her annual October tradition of pairing fragrances with Halloween costume ideas, put together a phenomenal list of fragrances to set the mood for watching a handful of A24-associated films: If A24 Films Were Perfumes