Without Skin: The Other Lamb
I saw a movie over a year ago that I still think about on the regular. Sadly, it’s one that doesn’t seem like it ever found its audience, and those that did happen across it, weren’t that audience. But I was absolutely its audience.
I’m talking about The Other Lamb, a subtle, slow burn folk horror from Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska. It follows Selah, a teenage girl born and raised in a polygamist cult as they look for the promised land. The design and cinematography in this is gorgeous, which is integral to its own world-building.
There is only one man in this cult: their Shepherd. Everyone else is either a wife or a daughter. Conspicuously, there aren’t nearly enough daughters to account for how many babies had to be born of these wives. It’s a point driven home when one wife dies giving birth to a boy, whom the Shepherd immediately gives back to his mother on her funeral pyre.
But what of Selah? At the beginning, she is a devoted child, but there are cracks in the perfect facade her father demands of her. Her hair doesn’t stay braided so easily. She does not sleep readily at bed time. She bickers with her fellow sisters and a wife who is barely older than her. Yet her father loves her the most, possibly because she hasn’t yet gotten her period despite being one of his oldest daughters. She is, therefore, more pure than the others.
This purity of blood is paramount in the Shepherd’s cult. He blesses them with Lamb’s blood, but banishes those menstruating to a ramshackle hut on the edge of their land. It’s like a hellacious version of The Red Tent. Anyone determined to be unclean, including those who go against the Shepherd, are sequestered there so that they don’t pollute the others.
You can guess where this is going. Driven off their land by the encroaching modern world, the whole cult sets off on an arduous walk through the mountains. It’s on the walk that Selah’s sister rat her out for bleeding in secret. She’s immediately banished to walk behind the rest of them with the fallen wife Sarah. She’s no longer the pure, innocent daughter.
In case you’ve forgotten this is a horror movie, there are implications for this transformation into womanhood once she finishes her bleed. Her mother, who died giving birth to her, was always Shepherd’s favorite, and you can bet your butt that her father has told her just how much she looks like her dear mother. Gag.
But here is where The Other Lamb diverges from a lot of other folk horror. In most stories, the protagonist is swallowed by whatever Happening is part of its own unique folk horror chain. Sergeant Howie burns in The Wicker Man. Ned gets his eyes plucked out in Harvest Home. Dani becomes the May Queen in Midsommar.
Not Selah. Instead of accepting a new reality as presented to her, Selah and her sisters firmly reject their reality violation. When their father drowns all their mothers and tries to welcome his daughters as his new wives, they do the unthinkable in their world. They attack their Shepherd and kill him, before returning home.
I found it a rather satisfying conclusion.