“We do think we are the superior race on earth, and we do take what we want,” Rapace considers. “So it’s also that. Maria does think that she’s entitled to this lamb, even though it’s not hers. But also Ada becomes the recipe for healing, and when you’re that desperate for life and to be a mother again, I think all tools are allowed.”
Yet as Rapace also admits, the action is like “a curse” from a storybook. If you take take something, something will be taken from you. If you use violence, violence will eventually be used against you. So in a vengeful cosmic sense, Ada’s other father killing Ingvar, which leaves Maria totally isolated, is the world being just. It’s an eye for an eye. And yet, there is also something profoundly different between Maria’s actions and how those committed against Ingvar are presented onscreen….
The Importance of What’s Best for Ada
When we watched Maria execute Ada’s biological mother, it’s ruthless and savage, and even monstrous. But it was also told entirely from Maria’s perspective. As Rapace said, it felt like “me or her” and in the moment, we watch the gunshot from the coldness of Maria’s gaze. We later learn that Pétur witnessed her bury a sheep, not yet comprehending its significance, but we did not see the slaughter from the sheep’s perspective—nor Ada’s.
That is all the difference in the world between a sheep’s death and that of Ingvar. Until the very end of the movie, Ada has shown no awareness that she is of a different species than her adoptive parents, nor has she revealed herself to be merely an animal. In his initial disgust at her existence, Pétur tries to tempt that feral side out of her, proving she is willing to eat grass off the ground. But we also see Ada learn to sit at a table and not just be able to eat like a human, but also think like one.
When Ingvar asks Ada to turn off the radio, she obeys like a dutiful daughter, displaying a keen self-awareness and intelligence to understand the Icelandic language and her physical space in that world. She similarly reveals a human child’s natural bashfulness when she witnesses her parents get drunk and party with a man who is still somewhat a stranger to her.
And in the moment of Ingvar’s death, we see his murder not through his eyes, but through the equally terrified gaze of Ada. She doesn’t want to go with her “father,” because the only father she’s ever known and loved is bleeding out right in front of her. She is more human than animal, and the grim magic trick of Lamb is it convinces you to see things from her perspective—to worry about the well-being of the child and the well-being of this family whose joys and tragedies have been normalized. Ada is better off with Maria and Ingvar than she is with whatever that primal thing from the wilderness is. Which makes her fate as tragic as that of Maria’s.