"The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future" - Film Review
The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is an ecological, magical realism fairytale about the dangers of mistreating our planet. Hundreds of dead fish wash ashore in a polluted Chilean river. Out of nowhere, a woman (Mía Maestro) emerges from that same polluted river. Her name is Magdalena and she passed away many years ago, but somehow she has returned. Magdalena’s husband (Marcial Tagle) spots her and calls his daughter, Cecelia (Leonor Varela), in a panic, asking her to come home. The past and the present are now mixed and have the potential to change the future.
A double feature of The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future and How To Blow Up a Pipeline would feel urgently relevant to this precipice we’re teetering on. Both are incendiary looks at humanity’s negative impact on our planet and the extreme means with which activists are calling attention to the ways our planet is suffering. The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future takes a more genre-bending approach by mixing supernatural, fantasy, horror, drama, and a light dusting of comedy to get its point across, while How To Blow Up a Pipeline sticks mainly to the heist genre. Both, however, are angry, desperate pleas for people to understand that our greedy capitalist desires have brutal effects on the world at large. Both films place a distinctly large amount of power into the hands of young people. By no means are they the only group fighting for climate legislation, but for them, it will always feel more urgent because they were born onto a planet that was already in trouble.
Photo by Inti Briones.
The beauty of The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is in the film’s ability to show how intrinsically interconnected humans are with our planet. This can be easy to forget when people are so wrapped up in their own lives, especially the people who live in large cities and move through life without really interacting with nature. The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future forces Cecilia to understand how her own trauma is reflected back at her through nature. It’s a starkly devastating scene that drives home the film’s main eco-conscious theme.
Perhaps the best quality of The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is that it instills a sense of hope in the viewer. It’s easy for environmental fatalism to feel like a heavy blanket draped over all aspects of life, but we’re at a fork in the road where there’s still a chance to right some of the wrongs of past generations. The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is a reminder that this planet belongs to every living creature, great or small, on land or in the ocean, and that while humans have acted like we’re in control, we never were. Earth existed long before we came along, and if we treat it right, will exist long after we leave it.
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