InfoSearched
A teenage girl raised inside an all-female forest cult starts to see through the man who calls himself their savior.
IFC Midnight has dropped the official trailer for The Other Lamb, a psychological folk-horror film from Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska making her English-language debut. The trailer sets up a rain-soaked, isolated commune ruled by a single man known only as “Shepherd,” and follows the teenage girl who starts questioning everything he’s told her. The film is set for North American release on April 3, 2020, after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and screening at the BFI London Film Festival.
- Raffey Cassidy (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) plays Selah, a devout teenager born into the cult, opposite Michiel Huisman (The Haunting of Hill House) as the patriarch Shepherd.
- The commune’s women are split by color-coded rank: older “wives” in red who serve as Shepherd’s sexual partners, and younger “sisters” and daughters dressed in blue.
- Shot in Ireland on a $3 million budget over a 25-day schedule, the story kicks into gear when local law enforcement orders the group off their land, forcing Shepherd to march his flock toward a supposed “new Eden.”
A Cult Built on Color and Hierarchy
The trailer wastes no time establishing the group’s internal caste system. The “wives,” clad in red, occupy Shepherd’s inner circle as his sexual partners; the “sisters” and daughters, dressed in blue, exist further down the pecking order, raised from birth to see this arrangement as natural rather than coercive. Screenwriter Catherine Smyth-McMullen builds the story around Selah aging into that hierarchy just as the cracks start to show, and Denise Gough’s Sarah — an estranged, skeptical wife whose disillusionment predates Selah’s own — gives the trailer its clearest early warning sign that the group is not what it claims to be.
Cassidy, who audiences will recognize from Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, carries the trailer’s quieter, more unsettling moments — visions and hallucinations that hint at Selah’s growing awareness of what happened to her mother. Huisman’s Shepherd, meanwhile, is pitched as charismatic rather than cartoonishly menacing, which is precisely what makes his hold over the commune’s women land as believable rather than exaggerated.
Szumowska’s English-Language Debut
Szumowska, an acclaimed Polish filmmaker, is working in English for the first time with The Other Lamb, and the trailer leans hard into the atmospheric, image-driven style she’s built her reputation on. The production shot entirely in Ireland’s wilderness, using the country’s fog and rain to give the commune’s forest setting a genuinely oppressive, cut-off-from-civilization feel rather than a stylized horror-movie backdrop.
The women are dressed either in red or blue — the wives who share Shepherd’s bed, and the sisters and daughters who are simply waiting their turn.
That visual shorthand does a lot of narrative heavy lifting in under two minutes of trailer footage, telegraphing the power structure without a single line of dialogue explaining it. Fans who’ve been tracking the rest of the genre’s 2020 slate on the best upcoming horror movies of 2020 and 2021 will find The Other Lamb sitting closer to arthouse dread than jump-scare horror, in the vein of films built around slow-burn indoctrination rather than a masked killer.
The Road to a ‘New Eden’
The trailer’s central turn arrives when local law enforcement orders the commune off the land it’s been squatting on, forcing Shepherd to march the entire group — wives, sisters and daughters alike — across harsh, unfamiliar terrain toward a place he insists is their promised new Eden. It’s on that trek that Selah’s doubts calcify into something closer to rebellion, as she starts piecing together what actually happened to her mother and how much of Shepherd’s authority is built on manufactured myth rather than divine truth.
IFC Midnight is positioning the film as one of its higher-profile pickups after its festival run last fall, and the trailer’s marketing push arrives as the studio’s slate rounds out ahead of an April release. For a specialty distributor built on genre titles that skip the multiplex, an April 3 date gives The Other Lamb a clear lane against whatever counterprogramming lands that same weekend.
Between the TIFF premiere in September, the BFI London Film Festival slot that followed, and now a trailer built almost entirely on mood rather than exposition, IFC Midnight is clearly betting that Szumowska’s name and Cassidy’s performance can carry the film past the niche festival crowd and into wider release on April 3.
Mobbed by Raccoons
Remote Controlled Alligator Prank Just For Laughs
The Old Guard | Combat Training | Netflix
Morbius Teaser Trailer #1
Streamers SWATTED Live During Their Stream