Cow (2021)
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 94 minuten
Country:
United Kingdom
Directed by: Andrea Arnold
Stars: Lin Gallagher
IMDb score:
7,1 (2.738)
Releasedate: 14 January 2022
Cow plot
From her point of view, we follow Luma between two pregnancies. Luma is a cow that lives on a British farm and has little contact with humans. Almost without words, different phases of farm life are passed through. For humans, the use of milking machines and cauterization of incipient horns are banal processes, for the cow and her calves they seem threatening.
Reviews & comments
mrklm
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- 11629 messages
- 10041 votes
Luma was born on an English farm and Arnold followed this cow from that moment until the abrupt, but not very startling end for the average viewer. Although this commentary-free documentary was praised for showing that a cow also has a personality, it is nice that Luma is easily recognizable by her almost completely white head. Otherwise you really wouldn't be able to distinguish her from the rest! She stands in the stable, eats her food, moo's around her, frolic through the meadow and obediently walks from hot to her with the others. Animal Farm this certainly isn't, and the only startling thing is that Arnold wanted to make this movie in the first place.
Translated from Dutch · View original
Hannibal
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- 9379 messages
- 3300 votes
Looking at cows at cow height for an hour and a half is a bit too much cow in my opinion. The people seen in this film seem friendly, and the cows are spoken to by a loving farmer's wife ("good morning girls"), but friendly or not, they separate mom and child, cut holes in the ears, burn the horns off, udders grow into oversized skippy balls that barely allow the cow to move a step, and finally the cows shoot in the head. There's nothing friendly about that. Twenty minutes would have been enough, and I really don't need a movie like that to make me aware of the scandalous abuse we do of living beings. I didn't like Gunda much, I might like this a little bit better, but if there are more movies called "chicken" or "goat" with the farm experiences of animals mentioned in the title, I'll skip those. I've seen enough now.
Translated from Dutch · View original
N00dles
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- 633 messages
- 2308 votes
The maker has emphasized that this is not a vegan or political film and that it purely presents (animal) life as it is. Nevertheless, the film does make you aware of the cold, loveless treatment of (dairy) cows and calves in livestock farming. And then this farm is still relatively spacious and the dairy farmers still seem to take good care of their cattle.
Doesn't take away the fact that all that care and love is a wash nose. The cows lead a desolate existence (the trips into the spring pasture do not change that), comparable to that of slave laborers and prisoners in labor or concentration camps. They are treated as products; completely drained until they are economically worthless and then killed. The fact that some animal species are still allowed to be treated in this way and at the same time we do far too little to replace dairy and meat with plant-based alternatives (or cultured meat) is crazy for words. But hey, humanity is cruel, selfish and hypocritical and economic interests will always outweigh the welfare of supposedly 'dumb' animals. The current rise of BBB and the powerful agri lobby shows that we still have a long way to go before animal welfare is taken seriously.
Then the documentary itself: it is beautifully filmed, without too much fuss. Occasionally a few nice shots of the cow(s) at sunrise or at night in the spring pasture. It has not been dramatized anywhere, although the pitfall of the many close-ups is that we as viewers tend to want to see human emotions in the eyes of the cow. We will never really know what they think or feel. However, I found the moment when the calves were separated from Luna quite palpable in terms of emotion.
The ending is hard and raw, but no surprise. I thought the credits ended with the song Milk by Garbage was pretty bland.
3.5*
Translated from Dutch · View original
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