This outrageous story of a bereaved couple’s surrogate child ropes in a wild bestiary of creatures great and digital
Icelandic director Valdimar Jóhannsson makes a coolly outrageous feature debut with this jawdropping horror-comedy of loneliness, co-written by Jóhannsson with the lyricist and Björk collaborator Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, or Sjón. It is performed with unflinching commitment by its executive producer-star Noomi Rapace, who is first among equals in a great cast of humans, animals and various prosthetic and digital creature effects.
Maria (Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guðnason) are an unhappy couple with a remote farm in Iceland: it gradually becomes clear they have lost their only child. The drama begins with a strange spirit-visitation in the barn that scares the animals: a ewe becomes pregnant with a bizarre animal-human hybrid and poor, stricken Maria (her name’s importance is left for us to digest) conceives a passionate attachment to this precious being, naming it Ada after her dead human daughter.