The bovine life cycle makes for high dra­ma in the first Cow trailer

Andrea Arnold has already released short films titled Dog and Wasp, both of which turned out to focus on the hard­ships faced by ordi­nary humans, their ani­mal name­sakes being lit­tle more than metaphor. Not so with her lat­est project and first doc­u­men­tary, the upcom­ing Cow, the brand new trail­er for which we’re delight­ed to exclu­sive­ly share with you below.

View­ers of Arnold’s film will be pleased to find that it amply deliv­ers on the promise of its title, made up of noth­ing but footage of cows doing cow activ­i­ties: graz­ing, birthing calves, dying. The direc­tor used a light­weight cam­era to get up close and per­son­al with her bovine stars, fol­low­ing them into their pens for emo­tive close-ups that almost make these beau­ti­ful crea­tures seem human.

The trail­er, set to the haunt­ing yet apro­pos strains of ​‘Milk’ by Amer­i­can alter­na­tive rock insti­tu­tion Garbage, shows us the life-giv­ing won­der of a lac­tat­ing heifer. In her milk, she doesn’t just pro­vide the human race with a refresh­ing way to keep our cal­ci­um lev­els up, but sus­tains her off­spring with nour­ish­ment from with­in her body, a deep bond cap­tured here with intense intimacy.

Like this year’s Gun­da, anoth­er doc­u­men­tary eschew­ing voiceover nar­ra­tion in its stark depic­tion of the barn­yard and its inhab­i­tants, tex­ture is a cru­cial part of the text. As vital as the cow her­self are the par­tic­u­lars of her sur­round­ings – the sound of hay crunch­ing under-hoof, the bleary ambi­ent light of an over­cast Eng­lish sky, the near­ly per­cep­ti­ble scent of fresh manure.

In her first-look review of Cow from its Cannes Film Fes­ti­val pre­mière, our crit­ic Sophie Monks Kauf­man praised the empa­thy Arnold extends to the sub­jects that most passers­by wouldn’t give a sec­ond look: ​“Strange­ly, for a film with a log­line that seems to be low on dra­mat­ic stakes, Cow feels like an Andrea Arnold pic­ture. There is a vis­cer­al appre­ci­a­tion for her help­less sub­jects that flows out of the film like spilled milk.”

Cow comes to cin­e­mas in the UK on 14 Jan­u­ary, and then goes online via MUBI on 11 Feb­ru­ary. A date for the US has yet to be set.