Words by Ann Lee

Tóti Guðnason knew his first film as a composer was a bit unusual. Lamb, A24’s disturbing slow-burn pastoral thriller about a couple who discover a half-lamb, half-human child and decide to adopt it as their own, plays out like a twisted fable. “It’s very hard to categorise!” he says. “It’s easy to look at it as a horror film but it's more of a story about grief and it is funny as well.” For the score, he knew he would have to come up with something equally as inventive.  

When we meet Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason), a sense of loss hangs heavy in the air. They work hard tending to their farm and their animals in a remote valley in Iceland. It’s a peaceful way of life but it’s also emotionally muted; the spouses get through their days with barely a word to each other. Things take a dark turn when one of their sheep gives birth to this strange hybrid baby and the forces of nature try to reclaim what is theirs. 

“It is a very silent film,” says Guðnason. “There's not a lot of dialogue. So the question becomes should you fill that up with music? Or should you come to terms with the silence and play more into it? The director Valdimar Jóhannsson and I decided to keep it very small, to let the silence speak for itself. We tried not to push music into places where it wasn't needed.”

The film’s eerie silence is more likely to be punctured by a sheep bleating rather than the soundtrack while the dialogue is just as sparse as the desolate landscape. When there is music, the Icelandic composer tried to create an organic feel to it and played around with different sounds to create a score that is as haunting and unsettling as the strikingly original story that unfolds. 

A string quartet was brought on board and the composer decided to play the cello himself even though he says: “ I'm not a great cellist!” But he enjoyed the contrast between his more “naive” playing and their polished style. “If you want to put it in metaphorical terms, you can look at it as the parents and the child making things together. Not being an expert on an instrument can give you a bit more freedom to sound bad in a good way.”

Guðnason even recorded water during his sonic explorations. “We wanted to keep water in the back of people’s minds. If you record it at high sample rates, you can pitch it down and get some things that you don't [normally] hear.” He didn’t end up using much of those recordings. Instead, “looping” feedback became the foundation of the score. “It is a natural thing that happens, it moves air. It is an acoustic thing in a sense, but it doesn't really sound acoustic. As such it makes for a great replacement for electronic sources.”

Jóhannsson encouraged Guðnason to experiment as much as possible. The Icelandic filmmaker co-wrote the screenplay with poet Sjón and Lamb won the Un Certain Regard Prize of Originality award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. His debut feature is also Iceland’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at next year’s Academy Awards. 

The pair “clicked” straight away when they met up to talk about the project and were in constant discussion as the score evolved. “He was very open to anything,” says Guðnason. “He's one of those directors that has a lot of opinions on music but doesn't necessarily speak the language. So the process started with us just creating a vocabulary. It was a very rewarding dialogue. He likes talking about these things. Usually, I'd send him a scene and he would say: ‘I think I like it. Let me listen to it 50 more times and get back to you.’ He was very involved and understood how important the role of music is.”

When the film premiered at Cannes Film Festival, Jóhannsson was sure that audiences would get Lamb’s quirky humour. But Guðnason wasn’t so sure. “It was the first time we showed it to a large group of people. Me and Valdimar were hoping the whole time that people would laugh. I was like: ‘I don't think they will. It's a strange scenario.’ He was like: ‘I think they will.’" The composer was happy to be proved wrong. "Everybody burst out laughing in all the places he had anticipated for them to do that.”

Lamb’s offbeat story delves into parenthood and grief. It's given emotional weight by Maria’s journey in the film. The character is transformed as she embraces motherhood and is portrayed movingly by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star Rapace. Her torrent of feelings is never spoken out loud. Instead, the audience watches transfixed as they flit quietly over her face. “This movie would have been totally different with another actress,” says Guðnason. “She's just amazing. She definitely has the most emotional value in the film. Her facial expressions didn’t need a lot of things to enhance them because she's so great. A lot of the time we just kept it silent and let them speak for themselves.”

The bizarre baby lamb at the centre of the film, who the couple name Ada, was created using CGI. “There's not a lot of CGI that has been done in Icelandic productions. I thought: ‘That's going to be a pivotal point for this to work. The lamb has to look good.’ It really did. They did an excellent job on that.”

Guðnason was brought up in a musical environment in Reykjavík and Blönduós in the north of Iceland. His dad is a music teacher and conductor, who co-founded a collective that focuses on new classical music while his mother is a former mayor. The composer learned the violin and guitar when he was a child before studying jazz guitar as a teenager and then classical composition at Iceland’s University of the Arts. Guðnason is also the guitarist for art metal band Agent Fresco. 

“I've always known that I would do music for the rest of my life since I was a kid. I’ve been around orchestras my whole life. When I was 16 I decided to put all my eggs in one basket and start to make music fully. When something like that just calls you, I think it's just a natural thing to do. I'm in this band as well. I was always trying to teach the other guys how to work on DAWs [digital audio workstations] and it just didn't come naturally to them."

“That’s what I've learned. Not all people are that curious about technology, about sounds and how sounds work. I thought everybody was like that when I was younger, but I've come to realise that people can be wonderful musicians without having this need to create. That's definitely the thing that I get the most enjoyment out of in life and I'm just so grateful to be able to do that all day, every day.”

Even though Lamb is Guðnason’s first project as a composer, it’s not the first score he’s worked on. The musician's CV includes a stint as Ólafur Arnalds’ assistant on TV drama Broadchurch and as a music arranger on Joker. His half-sister Hildur Guðnadóttir composed the film’s music and won the Academy Award for best original score in 2020 for her work on director Todd Phillips’ supervillain origin story. She became the third woman ever to win an Oscar in that category. 

“I've learned so much from her. She's just amazing and everybody knows now how amazing she is.” Guðnason has picked up plenty of tips just by watching her work. “She'll have a snippet of an idea and just really stick to it. Maybe I’ll be like: ‘Are we sure about that?’ It always turns out to be great. Being a small part of her journey has just been amazing and seeing her reap the rewards after all these years of hard work in a male-dominated business is just incredible. I’m a very proud little brother.”

His musical taste growing up was wide and diverse. He was obsessed with Nigel Kennedy's version of Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and would play the album on repeat as well as listening to Eminem and Rammstein. “I started to play the violin because of Kennedy's interpretation of Vivaldi. I've been a huge Bach fan my whole life but kind of struggled a bit with a Bach complex. I'm sure a lot of composers do as well, you know, that nothing will ever be as great as that." He credits Guðnadóttir, who also worked on Chernobyl and Mary Magdalene, and Under the Skin composer Mica Levi as the biggest influences on Lamb’s score. 

Guðnason also toured with prolific composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The late musician scored the music for films like The Theory of Everything, Sicario and Arrival. He passed away in Berlin from an accidental overdose in 2018. “He was just a wonderful time guy. He was very knowledgeable about everything. He was just a curious person about sound and music.”

As well as getting ready to release an album with Agent Fresco, Guðnason will be working with Arnalds again although he’s not allowed to talk about their upcoming project. “I don't think it has been announced,” he says apologetically. 

For now, he’s incredibly proud of the work he’s done on the Lamb soundtrack. “I think it’s a strange score to make as your first score. There are not a lot of standalone tracks on it. At the same time, I think you can enjoy it as one piece. It's just a dream project to start with because I could experiment a lot and do weird things that I'm interested in. I think we managed to create something unique. It's a very strange film but it's really beautiful.” As for his favourite song on the soundtrack, it has to be closing track Dýrid. “It has this kind of downward spiralling harmonic progression. That’s the only track that I really let that side of me shine.“

What Guðnason enjoyed the most about making the score was the freedom he had to explore. A lot of the music he created didn’t end up in the final cut but for him that’s just part of the process; being able to try things even if they don’t work out and having fun while he’s doing it. “It's also just the flow you get into. Half the things you don’t even remember doing! That's the best thing when you get into a flow and you're not really thinking. The music is just pulling you in the direction it needs to go in rather than you sitting with a pen and paper saying: ‘It needs to go there.’ That's the most rewarding feeling I get as a composer.”