I won’t ever look at cows the same way again: Andrea Arnold’s Cow reviewed

The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring a cow, with almost nothing else in it, apart from this cow. It feels like a test. Can I watch a cow for 93 minutes? What does this cow do that’s so interesting? I see cows all the time from the train and they just sort of lounge about, ruminating, don’t they? But this wants you to look, really look, at what it is to be a cow. And you do and you will invest. (Oh, Luma.)

Arnold spent four years, off and on, filming Luma, a cow at a dairy farm in Kent. Luma looms from the dark background of one of the film’s stills like a Rembrandt. You’d look, really look, if she were hanging in the Rijksmuseum, Arnold seems to be saying. Luma has black smudges on her nose and a dot beneath an eye. Her eyes are huge, round and gorgeous and are framed by Kardashian-like eyelashes. But Luma is not a Disney cow. Luma is wholly in service to humankind. She does not suffer mistreatment as such. There are the occasional glimpses of farmhands and they always appear cheery. (‘Come on, girlies.’) But you do understand that violence is somehow being done.

The film opens with Luma giving birth to her latest calf, which is pulled out via those ropes as always seen on All Creatures Great And Small or Yorkshire Vet. But whereas those shows end there — a happy birth! — this does not. Luma licks her calf all over and raises it to its feet but then the two are separated. Luma’s milk is solely for human consumption so she’s led to the milking machines, still with the afterbirth dangling between her legs.