The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future – first-look review

Chilean film­mak­er Fran­cis­ca Ale­gría heeds the call for envi­ron­men­tal con­scious­ness and action in her beguil­ing new fea­ture The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future, a mag­i­cal real­ist fable about what it means to pro­tect the har­mo­ny of the nat­ur­al world.

As shoals of singing fish wash up on the shores of the Río Cruces, dying from the pol­lut­ed water, a woman emerges from the deep, gasp­ing for air. Elu­sive­ly mute, Mag­dale­na (Mía Mae­stro) was believed to have been dead for many years and returns to soci­ety where her pres­ence has a strange effect on the objects and peo­ple around her; microwaves and mobile phones come to life when she pass­es, peo­ple fall into uncon­trol­lable fits of laugh­ter, and when her for­mer hus­band catch­es sight of her, he col­laps­es from the surprise.

To take care of him, his daugh­ter Cecil­ia (Leonor Varela) and her two chil­dren trav­el to the town where she and broth­er Bernar­do (Mar­cial Tagle) grew up, while Bernar­do takes over the care of their father’s dairy farm in his absence, turn­ing a blind eye to the ter­ri­ble warn­ing posed by the dead fish for his cat­tle. Nei­ther of the sib­lings believe their moth­er could have returned, but their own even­tu­al sight­ings of her bring up long-buried pain and hid­den fam­i­ly secrets.

As a folk­loric med­i­ta­tion on the rela­tion­ship between human and envi­ron­ment, moth­er and child, Alegría’s film has an earth­ly mys­ti­cal qual­i­ty to it, mov­ing through its min­i­mal plot with flu­id­i­ty and entice­ment. The for­est set­ting is lit with an acidic green glow that hints at oth­er­world­li­ness as well as an envi­ron­ment under threat, and char­ac­ters stum­ble into dream­like sce­nar­ios that deliv­er a vision of the world they hope to live in. But under­neath these lofti­er con­ceits is a deeply emo­tion­al nar­ra­tive about famil­ial rela­tion­ships and moth­er­hood that occa­sion­al­ly suf­fers from oblique­ness but emerges by the end of the film as poignant commentary.

Magdalena’s return coin­cides with the habitat’s decline, posi­tion­ing her as a kind of eco-prophet, or Moth­er Earth alle­go­ry, on a restora­tive mis­sion. The trau­ma of los­ing her moth­er from a young age had hurt Cecil­ia seem­ing­ly beyond repair and affect­ed her rela­tion­ship with her own chil­dren, par­tic­u­lar­ly her eldest who is trans­gen­der. Ale­gría deft­ly ties togeth­er Cecilia’s feel­ings of aban­don­ment and her lack of com­pas­sion with the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis occur­ring, a com­par­i­son which sug­gests heavy-hand­ed­ness but is deliv­ered with sub­tle­ty and care.

Even in its abstract­ness, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is a curi­ous film that encour­ages intro­spec­tion and offers a hope­ful vision for col­lec­tive heal­ing. In one of the film’s most mov­ing scenes, Cecil­ia suc­cumbs to her tears in an enclo­sure for the calves sep­a­rat­ed from their moth­ers on the dairy farm. The uncer­tain cows approach with cau­tion but soon warm to her as she cries for every­thing she and they have lost. It’s an emo­tion­al real­i­sa­tion that alters her out­look on the world that cur­rent­ly exists for her chil­dren and helps her under­stand her own fail­ings in order to start again.