Claustrophobic and intimate, “The Lamb of God” resembles an imagined memory, made up from fragments of a few summer days and, especially, nights, in which the heat prevents one from sleeping, and restlessness takes over the dead of night as in a fever dream. The new film by David Pinheiro Vicente, who won Curtas’ Best Portuguese Short Film Award in 2018 with “Where the Summer Goes (Chapters on Youth”), has at its center the ritualistic sacrifice of a lamb, offered to the village feast by a family, and focuses on the consequences of this act, and on the way the family’s different members relate to the world around them. The youngest son, to whom is promised the lamb has just left for a couple of days; the mother, concerned with her children; the eldest brother who, disturbed by what he sees, listens through the cracks in the village. The apparition of a bloodstain reaffirms the relentless cycle of life, filmed in all its fragility and complexity. (JA)