Guy Lodge Film CriticA bookending pair of calving scenes, an hour apart and starkly reversed in perspective, tell the whole story in “Cow,” Andrea Arnold’s tough, full-immersion documentary on the life cycle of a bovine servant.
In the first, we watch in challenging close-up as a calf, glazed in gelatinous afterbirth, emerges feet first from the womb of her mother, a veteran dairy cow named Luma who has been through this ordeal many times before.
The camera is locked on Luma’s rear, eerily detached from her moos of discomfort, as if she were little more than a vessel for new life; we see her only when, all too briefly, she gets to lick the newborn clean.
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