Cow
First screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Andrea Arnold. Documentary about the life and inevitable death of a farm animal in the UK. VOR:③
Likely to fire up vegans and animal activists everywhere and maybe to modestly move the needles of meat eaters and milk chuggers. Strong craft, too!
I had contemplated how miserable cows must be, though reading that they often have trouble stepping around their own ballooning udders was not the same as witnessing that difficulty. I had not contemplated how loud the life of a cow is, given not just the echoes of the animals' own sounds but the various mechanics and hydraulics and motors of 21st-century farming as well as the pop music pumped in to "enliven" the space, whether for the humans or their bovine captives. The sound design is really remarkable, as is the photography, which somehow draws out the individuality of Luna, the "star" cow, without the film using any gimmicks or visual totems to distinguish her.
Cow has no talking heads or on-screen informatics, so whether you react with curiosity or awe or horror or will say a lot about the psychic and ethical orientations you brought to the movie. By a similar token, spending what you're already inclined to believe, Cow's aura of continuity with Andrea Arnold's scripted features will either underscore your sense of her as a restless poet of autonomous instinct, insisting on itself amid whatever bramble of natural or cultural forces try to squelch it, or feed your grudge that she has a tendency to film public housing or working-class enclaves as if they are factory farms, deploying her camera the way a zoo patron or safari tourist uses their binoculars. I'm almost entirely in the former camp, though I get why people tussle about this. Anyway, I found Cow visually, sonically, and environmentally gripping, hooked more onto telling microscopic details while handily conveying their superstructural contexts. For me, the 97 minutes did not drag or invite distraction, even in the context of a living room, and the end will be awfully hard to forget. Grade:B+
