If one is looking for some more female-led cult horror after last year’s Midsommar, Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska has made her English-language debut with The Other Lamb. Led by Raffey Cassidy (who also endured endless amounts of trauma in Vox Lux and The Killing of a Sacred Deer), the film played at TIFF, London Film Festival, and Fantastic Fest, and now the trailer has debuted ahead of a release next month from IFC Midnight.
The story follows a teenager whose only experience of life has been the cult she was born into, but she begins to question her surroundings as seemingly terrifying consequences abound. I last saw Szumowska’s work in the Juliette Binoche-led Elles and her striking visual approach seems once again in full force here in this compelling preview
See the trailer and poster below.
For her entire life, the cult she was born into has been all that teenage Selah (Raffey Cassidy) has known. Along with a band of similarly cloistered young women she lives seemingly unstuck in time, cut off from modern society in a remote forest commune presided over by a man called Shepherd (Michiel Huisman), a controlling, messiah-like figure with a frightening dark side. But when her insular world is rocked by a series of nightmarish visions and disturbing revelations, Selah begins to question everything about her existence—including her allegiance to the increasingly dangerous Shepherd. Awash in images of primal, dreamlike dread, this provocative fable is a haunting vision of adolescent awakening and revolt.
The Other Lamb opens in theaters and on VOD on April 3.