Mark Reviews Movies: COW

Cow, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 7, 2022

Director Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Magda Kowalczyk simply watch. There's a cow on a farm, somewhere in England, and it goes about its routine for days, weeks, months, or maybe about a year. Time doesn't really matter to a cow, so time doesn't matter in Cow.

Life unfolds in a series of routines. Those become more difficult with repetition over time—with all of the various physical strains of breeding, standing around in confined pens, having those udders engorge with milk for an absent calf, and just waiting for the farmers to keep up the little and big cycles of the lives of their livestock.

There are moments here, though, in which the patterns of life of Luma, the cow at the center of this documentary, are broken. It's not done by the farmers, who have gone through all of these motions with Luma and so many cows over the years that birthing a calf seems as routine as herding the cows through various gates to be fed or milked. The breaking point seems to come from somewhere or something inside Luma.

Near the end of the film, we overhear that the cow has given birth six times, and every time, that calf is taken away from its mother, in order to become part of the continuous processes on the dairy farm. The birth of Luma's fifth calf, which is also followed by the filmmakers, seems to be different. As the newborn is taken away, Luma starts calling in, not a typical moo, but a bray—low and repeated and, if we're going to put some emotional tenor on the sound, seemingly desperate.

The farmers note that Luma has become more protective since this point. Call it base instinct kicking in or something else—sadness or even trauma—within the cow. Either way, in those moments of meeting Luma's face at the same level or looking closely into the cow's eye (Kowalczyk and/or the camera operator are right there, even after the farmers have shut the gates and left), we can intuit something behind that face and in those eyes.

Whether it's real or simply the intrinsic, intimate power of a camera capturing its subject is irrelevant. We see it and feel it, and that—as unlikely as it may seem, given the subject—is all that matters.

It's obvious, of course, that Arnold has a point to make about the treatment of animals like Luma and the other cows, which appears awful, even on a farm that is confident enough in its practices to be filmed in such detail. That's also the power of the camera and how the filmmakers use it to capture the muddy ground, the cow's hesitation to be herded, and the difficulty Luma has in performing those routines near the end. Cow may not change minds in that regard, but it definitely allows and encourages us to contemplate if, what, and how a cow might do the same.

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