No, you’re quite right, we need to address that title first. What kind of film do you think The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future might be? Some fusion of Disney singalong and science fiction, maybe, a cross between Home on the Range and Ulysses 31. Sadly, Francesca Allegría’s film is not that. Happily, it’s very good on its own terms. A fusion of family drama, magical realism and the emerging “cli-fi” subgenre of explicitly environmental science fiction, it also delivers on the promise of its title. There are cows, they sing, their song reveals something about the future, and somehow the effect is deeply haunting, rather than silly or cute.
We’ve been set up for it by the opening scene of the film, where nature-documentary-style footage of fish swimming in a river is overlaid with a song that appears to be sung from the fishes’ perspective. The river, according to the fish, who’d know, used to be a safe home, but “now it carries something withered that confuses us/ Is it death coming?” It is, but it’s more than that. A very nasty chemical has entered the River Cruces, and its immediate effect is a mass die-off of fish (similar to the ones taking place in The Geek Show’s home territory of Teesside, England, which I’ve covered elsewhere). Its other effects range from the horribly inevitable – more animal deaths as the chemical makes its way up the food chain – to the heartening – mass protests against the firms thought to be responsible for the disaster, including the possible cinematic first of environmentalist bikers. There is also one effect that even the most determined catastrophist would struggle to see coming.
That effect is the one we see as soon as the fish stop singing, which is that a woman drags herself up from the bed of the river and walks into the nearby town. Allegría has clued us in to the fact that her film will have a fantastical element, in ways both subtle (the first shot is of a row of fly agaric, real fungi whose red-and-white caps are nevertheless immediately redolent of fairy tales) to the brashly unrealistic (the fish sing). Even so, this revenant from the river is a major shock. Her name is Magdalena, she died in the Cruces many years ago, and now she’s returning to a world where her husband has grown old and her daughter has a child of her own.
It makes its points through eerie implications and audacious fantasy rather than anything more heavy-handed, and there is humour in the mix too.
As a family drama, The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is consistently compelling. Neither the bizarre fantasy elements nor the wide-ranging environmental statements manage to overwhelm the small, personal story at its heart, and that in itself is a major achievement. Cecilia, Magdalena’s now-adult daughter, has a fractious relationship with her grandmother Felicia, and the son she thought she had is exploring a possible trans or non-binary identity. (This character is called Tomás in the credits, suggesting Allegría and her co-writers Fernanda Urrejola and Manuela Infante did not intend them to be a trans woman: regardless, they are very insistent that they’re not a cisgender man) Magdalena’s reappearance is obviously a crisis for this family, but it also has critical relevance to the wider world. From her appearance in the aftermath of the chemical spill to the croaking frogs that follow in her wake, Allegría encourages the audience to read her as connected to nature in some way, perhaps some kind of environmental avenger.
At this point, the comics-literate may ask, is this just a high-toned arthouse version of DC’s Swamp Thing or Marvel’s Man-Thing? (Or, for that matter, Troma’s The Toxic Avenger, currently being remade by Macon Blair?) And the answer is, maybe, but it’s a credit to the conviction of Allegría’s vision that, even at this comics-saturated point in popular culture, I spent the run-time thinking about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bacurau instead. That’s not to say that The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is self-serious. It makes its points through eerie implications and audacious fantasy rather than anything more heavy-handed, and there is humour in the mix too. When Tomás, whose rejection of their old identity parallels Magdalena’s rebirth in a subtle piece of plot structuring, asks his grandmother what it was like to die, she simply replies “Wet”.
Allegría’s bold choices are matched by a sterling team of collaborators, with Inti Briones’s cinematography turning apparently real woodlands into something that could sit alongside Anton Furst’s sets for The Company of Wolves. Her cast are also terrific, particularly Mía Maestro and Leonor Varela as Magdalena and Cecilia respectively. The film simply doesn’t work without them bringing heart to these people caught in a very strange situation. The Argentine Maestro and the Chilean Varela have both been in big international films, including, by an odd coincidence, two big vampire franchises – Maestro in the last two Twilight films, Varela in Blade II. The idea that any non-American performer who returns home has “failed” is, thankfully, becoming an outdated one, and The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future is a case in point. Allegría’s film is so strong that you look at Maestro and Varela’s decision to leave Hollywood in favour of making a small Chilean movie with an incredibly unwieldy title and think: yeah, who wouldn’t?
The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2022) is playing in selected cinemas nationwide from 24th March
