Documentary Releases: Cow (2021) - Reviewed

Courtesy of IFC Films
British director Andrea Arnold, best known for Fish Tank and the Shia LeBouf starring American Honey, is mostly known for making fictional works usually concerning female characters in struggle.  Her latest four-years-in-the-making venture however, in her first documentary film, couldn’t be more removed from her preexisting works if it tried despite sharing kindred visual and thematic elements.  The aptly named Cow, a cinema verité styled documentary, closely follows the life of female dairy cow Luma on a dairy farm called Park Farm in Kent, England, watching her closely following the milking, birthing of a calf and maintenance of the cow’s health and hygiene.  Think of it as a more humanist Gunda primarily focused on one animal and what it means to be cattle.

 
Made on the side while Arnold was editing the show Big Little Lies and bereft of a vegan agenda, instead just training her camera on Luma who occasionally bumps it but allows Arnold and her crew to get closer to her than most animals would ever grow comfortable with, Cow is a sparse unfettered view of Luma the cow while also factoring in the various invasive human machinery and techniques used to care for the cows.  Unlike Gunda which took great pains to keep any and all humans from visibility to sounds absent from the film, Cow wants you to be aware of what it means for Luma to more or less be in what looks like an animal prison with humans poking and prodding the cows every chance they get.  According to the director, the film threatened to shine unwanted attention on the Park Farm which was not her intention.

 
Featuring a tracklist sure to sell soundtrack albums of current pop tunes heard on the radios of the farm while Luma the cow goes about her business and shot extraordinarily by Magda Kowalczyk, Cow is an interesting project which aims for the same transcendences achieved by Gunda but doesn’t hide director Andrea Arnold from the camera as she’s seen following Luma at certain points.  Probably the most unique aspect of the cinematography is how it follows Luma’s head movements, looking up at the sky as she looks up before following her gaze back down to the grass for more feeding.  Released in 4K by IFC Films in the US, a first for Arnold, Cow over the course of the movie and the music gradually begins to humanize Luma and make her appear more feminine in form.
 
At times difficult to watch, particularly the ending, Cow puts a spotlight on the struggles lived out by these animals and manages like Gunda to make you think twice about what the meat you eat and the milk you drink.  While not as pure and evocative as Viktor Kossakovsky’s aforementioned documentary epic, Cow nevertheless is a fascinating and engaging forward step in pure documentary form observing animal life under the thumb of human farmers.  


Most certainly a strong double bill with that other documentary film that lets you know how it feels to live on a farm where eventually you’ll likely be killed and eaten by humans, some will tire of the film’s relentless footage of Luma being poked and prodded, an endurance test in and of itself.  Yet in the end most will feel they’ve experienced something extraordinary and difficult to put into words, as close to the pure cinematic documentary expressions of Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka and more recently Aquarela where the images and sounds tell the story more clearly than conventional narrative dialogue can. 

--Andrew Kotwicki