‘Cow’ review: Andrea Arnold’s wordless documentary movingly focalizes the humanity of animals [Cannes Review]

“Okay, so we’re really gonna watch a cow for two hours,” a fellow attendee said, amused and skeptical, just before the 2 p.m. screening of Cow. A few deliberately positioned themselves by the aisles, to make a quick exit. And well… Fair enough. But still: the theater was full. For a mostly dialogue-free, completely unnarrated documentary about two dairy cows to attract this much attention is a testament to the power of British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s oeuvre, the likes of which include past Cannes entries Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016).

But despite the skepticism—and despite more than a handful of walkouts over the film’s 94-minute runtime—Cow really does show cows for two hours, and it gets away with it. More than that, it provides a raw, textured, cinéma vérité view of mortality and animal cruelty—one that forces its viewers to question the nature of human consumption and factory farming, as well as humanity itself.

The result is remarkably moving. Arnold has always used animals as an avatar for human emotion—the glistening, gutted fish and chained-up horse in Fish Tank, the humming insects flitting over blades of grass in American Honey—so Cow feels like the natural extension of that principle, a near-complete substitution of animal for man. Human bodies, when present, are reduced to disembodied limbs in rubber boots. Unlike the cows, they don’t have names. They barely have memorable faces. Their voices sound less dimensional and less dynamic than the cows’, murmuring soft encouragements that feel patronizing given the humanity with which Arnold imbues her bovine subjects. How ironic it is to hear one of them happily announce, “You’re free!” to a group of calves being shepherded from a metal transport truck into another gated enclosure.

Indeed, only a few minutes into Cow, the cows (two of them in particular, Luma and her calf) begin to take on anthropomorphic humanity, previously reserved for, well, humans. This is quite the feat, given that cows aren’t pretty animals, nor do they make pretty sounds; they’re not embraced in popular culture as cute or cuddly, in the same way as a puppy or a kitten. But by removing humans from the frame, by insisting on staying with these creatures, Arnold establishes the premise that these are the main characters—beings with feeling and emotion and desire. In short, she offers them personhood and consciousness. And though they may not be cute in a conventional sense of the word, Arnold makes cows interesting to look at, if not beautiful: Cow embraces the raw physicality of these animals, from their muscled haunches to their distended udders to their expressive, darting eyes, fringed with white eyelashes.

Perhaps this is all projection; perhaps anthropomorphizing these animals with human emotion comes from the same Disneyfication of the animal kingdom that brought us singing birds and dancing bunnies. It’s true, after all, that these animals can’t vocalize their feelings in the conventional way, and to some extent their interiority will always be a projection of our own. Yet Arnold reminds us that these animals experience sensation, showing both pain and pleasure writ large on their features. From the moment Luma’s calf is born with a resounding splotch onto the ground, it’s almost immediately subjected to immense suffering, the likes of which would be unimaginable to inflict on a human, much less a human child. The calf has its ears forcefully pierced, its horns brutally burned off with a hot iron prod that leaves two smoking gashes in its head, and Arnold shows its skittishness, its plaintive cry; it’s impossible to deny cruelty so plainly depicted. Likewise, Luma herself is subjected to a number of indecencies: Quickly after delivering her calf, she is ushered away, the placenta still swinging from the birth canal like a second tail, only to be prodded into starting the cycle of pregnancy all over again. It’s graphic, of course, but when has Andrea Arnold ever shied away from the unsightly, the impure, the taboo?

Not only are the humans superfluous in Cow, but they’re also culpable for much of the cows’ suffering. Though many of the procedures administered to Luma and her compatriots may be routine on a farm, even in some cases beneficial, it’s never pleasant to watch an automated milker attached forcefully to each of her udders or to see Luma shepherded through a maze of metal gates. The calves never get to nurse directly from their own mothers’ udders, but the machines do. Perhaps that’s the most chilling part of the film: the processes of nature, mechanized and optimized for human consumption. It’s telling that, for a film that never once mentions meat-eating, Cow is very effective propaganda for vegetarianism. A chilling final scene seals this point in with a shudder.

Yes, Cow may be two hours of cow footage, and yes, at times it’s slow, even boring. But dullness is not always a compromise of quality. Sometimes boredom is a necessary journey into real understanding. And sometimes, less is moo-re.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 74th Cannes Film Festival.