The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future: a haunting ecological fable

Chilean director Francisca Alegría’s impressive first feature develops some of the ideas explored in her short film And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye, which won the Jury Prize at Sundance in 2017. A young woman, Magdalena (Mía Maestro), emerges from a filthy river, surrounded by discarded rubbish and dying fish – apparently poisoned by waste from a local paper mill – many years after committing suicide there. Still wearing the clothes she drowned in, she walks back to the family’s dairy farm and into the lives of her now elderly husband, grown children and grandchildren.

The first half of the movie is measured: through a series of long takes, Magdalena reveals herself to her family members one by one, Alegría heightening this slow-build tension by carefully withholding information. The camera appears to move of its own accord from one character to the next, emphasising the film’s complex, collective focus – the cast is essentially ensemble, even if Magdalena’s daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) has the most screen time – and hinting at both the family’s fragmentation and its eerie psychic interconnectivity.

This fluid camera (Alegría has called it a “conscious camera”) lends the film an achingly strange atmosphere – as does Inti Briones’s luxuriant, otherworldly photography and a score that takes its cues from horror cinema. But the film is careful to situate its most magical element, Magdalena’s rebirth, within a realist aesthetic. Her physicality is emphasised by a close focus on both her body – as she emerges from the river, her face, hands and feet are muddy and her mouth is full of dirty water – and her physical needs, as she eats, drinks wine, takes a long shower, or fools around with a stranger at a party. Though they are initially surprised, most of the family seem ultimately to accept her return, as if it were somehow to be expected, and there are moments of smartly handled black comedy that derive from this upending of our own understanding of what a ghost story should look like or how a ghost should behave.

In fact, The Cow Who Sang posits Magdalena’s return to life as part of a natural cycle of death, decay and rebirth – an idea already signposted in the very first scene, in which a shot of the decomposing body of a mouse pans to a group of bright, red mushrooms. At the same time, the film is critical of interventions that pollute and corrupt the natural order, like the runoff from the factory that kills the fish and destroys a local ecosystem; the bees murdered by a fumigating neighbour; or the artificial insemination of the dairy cows and the removal of their calves for milking. This cruelty is rendered devastating in a scene where the moribund cows sing their lament to Cecilia: “Without my children / I lived dead / More dead than alive… So please / Let me die”, and a subsequent moment where she visits the orphaned calves, who suckle on her fingers. We are reminded that Magdalena, in her first life, “never liked the idea of the cows being a milk factory”, and her return is the catalyst for their liberation from suffering. Rather than introducing a perversion or inversion of order, Magdalena’s character becomes a counterpoint to the film’s ecological critique, offering up as an answer to cruelty and destruction the possibility of a more humane, ultimately restorative relationship with the natural world.

As the film develops, it struggles to keep abreast of the many ideas it introduces, and so the second half starts to lag, while certain key pieces of narrative information (like the reason for Magdalena’s suicide) are dropped in like afterthoughts. A strand about a gang of motorbike-riding activists who take Magdalena under their wing feels stylistically and narratively out of place, as if pulled from a different film entirely, and some characters – notably Cecilia’s children – seem underdeveloped, even if their existence is meant to be largely symbolic.

In spite of its missteps, The Cow Who Sang is an assured first feature that gently weaves an intimate, personal story about motherhood, family, trauma and loss into a wider fable about environmental ruin and the quiet, enduring power of the natural world. And if fables offer us broad, allegorical situations that can be mapped onto our own reality, then, like the film, they also let us know that we have choices to make about how that reality unfolds.

► The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is in UK cinemas now.