Cannes 2021: Where is Anne Frank, Stillwater, Lamb | Festivals & Awards

The end result is something worth sticking around for, more fascinating than fabulous, a kind of wild experiment in shifting storylines that takes the Amanda Knox narrative and tries to say something about the terrible things we do to save those we care about, no matter the cost to what we leave behind. The final moments in a dreary home, bereft of the sun and joy of France, show that many live in prisons of their own small-town small-mindedness that feel all the more constraining after a brief parole to another land.

Speaking of other lands, I’ve been a huge fan of Icelandic cinema for many years and had the absolute pleasure of helping to bring some attention to Grímur Hákonarson’s wonderful “Rams” during the 2015 Cannes festival. First time director Valdimar Jóhannsson brings his similarly titled “Lamb” to the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and while it shares some of the same bucolic, pastoral setting, they’re very different films indeed.

An aside about Iceland: First of all, if you’ve never been, you owe it to yourself to visit once travel restrictions are lifted. It’s an otherworldly landscape, and its collision between ice and fire, hot springs and freezing rivers, captivates those who travel there. This is a rock in the middle of the Atlantic with an environment so seemingly primal that it made warriors into poets, with many of the most durable of the Viking sagas emanating from those carving out their lives on the black sandy shores and windswept interiors. The nation’s resulting cinema has a kind of savage whimsy, where both beauty and violence seem to occupy the same space effortlessly.

Jóhannsson’s background in Special Effects for Hollywood blockbusters (including locally shot “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “Prometheus” and “Transformers: Age of Extinction”) turns what’s really an intimate family drama into something far more interesting to audiences attuned to its odd brand of tale. Hilmir Snær Guðnason, known to international audiences for his role in Baltasar Kormákur’s breakthrough “101 Reykjavik,” is perfectly complemented by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), here speaking perfect Icelandic thanks to her childhood spent growing up there. Along with Björn Hlynur Haraldsson and another key character, the group makes for an interesting family unit, dealing with the everyday travails of expectation and folly, all while supremely odd circumstance that drives the core of the narrative.