Cow (2021 | United Kingdom | 98 minutes | Andrea Arnold)
I see a lot of movies and consume a lot of caffeinated beverages in a year, but months the morning cortado I ordered from a sidewalk cart in Telluride on the way to seeing Cow sticks with me. In her clear-eyed documentary, Andrea Arnold and her camera follow a “nice-faced dairy cow with a strong attitude” named Luma to depict several years of the animal’s life on a mid-sized British farm. It’s not all bad — polite caretakers, grazing outside, warm summer nights sleeping under the stars — but no narration is needed to accentuate the complete weirdness of modern animal husbandry.
As the film opens, Luna is giving birth with the help of the caretaker farmers who pull the adorable baby calf from her womb. She immediately begins grooming it and we’re reminded that feeding their young is the real reason that cows’ udders swell with milk. It isn’t long, though, before Luma rejoins her compatriots around a giant circular station, where pop music plays in the distance and robots extract their milk for human consumption. By then, her calf has been moved to her new home where she gradually becomes acclimated to bottle feedings from humans. Along with the interventional nature of their feeding, coded tags soon adorn her ears and before horns can sprout they’ve been cauterized with hot iron.
It’s all deeply unnatural, but commonplace. Like many others, I’m so divorced from the means of dairy production that I have no idea whether this farm is a “nice” one or especially bad. My sense is that it’s a pretty far cry from the even deeper horrors of industrial mega-farming, which I suppose makes it all the more unsettling.
Humans exist only at the edges of Arnold’s frame, but what we see of them seems to be generally caring and attentive to the health and well-being of the animals. They arrange a romantic evening under the fireworks between Luma and an unnamed suitor who begins a second cycle of calving. Arnold doesn’t ascribe human emotions to these animals, but it is difficult not to imagine what might be lurking behind their gentle eyes as we watch her go about her existence, moo with urgency upon separation from her offspring, silently endure intrusive veterinary visits, and standing for hours attached to technology for automated milkings. With more of the observational rhythms of American Honey than the suspenseful thrills of her earlier work like Red Road, the film lulls the audience with its revelatory pacing, like its bovines, into a sense of of unearned complacence.
The unsentimentally of its conclusion is unsettling, but if the film has a political message or a call to action, it seems to be a request to spend at least ninety minutes engaging with the source of our food and taking it into consideration the next time you head to the dairy aisle.
Cow arrives in theaters and VOD on April 8; including a week-long engagement at Seattle’s Grand Illusion.
Image courtesy IFC Films; portions of this review appeared previously as part of our coverage of the 2022 Telluride Film Festival.