‘The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future’ Review: Mother Resurrected

The closing 20 minutes or so of “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future,” the slow-burning parable from the writer-director Francisca Alegría, are nearly completely wordless. In its final act, the movie follows the members of a fractured household as they wander about, solid in numerous instructions and undone by latest oddities on their dairy farm. The energy of Alegría’s characteristic debut is discovered not in dialogue or explication, however within the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disillusioned moms and dads, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.

At the movie’s begin, a girl (Mía Maestro) bubbles up from the floor of the water, touchdown on a riverbank full of useless fish. In a retailer, an previous man (Alfredo Castro) collapses on the sight of her. Miraculously alive and never having aged a day, she seems to be Magdalena, the person’s spouse who mysteriously drowned herself a long time earlier, leaving him and his two kids behind. Soon after, the person’s daughter, Cecilia (Leonor Varela) returns to the household farm to take care of her shaken father. Cecilia has her hangups about her mom’s loss of life and her personal teenage youngster’s transgender id.

As Magdalena wanders again to the farm, the household begins to reckon with a sophisticated previous, and the cows, which she had all the time liked however that endure from the realities of manufacturing facility farming, start performing unusually. Through these animals, the movie turns into an allegorical prayer — an elegy for human failures towards each other and the dwelling world, and an incantation for a return and reversal of kinds.

While usually elliptical, Alegría’s directing is affected person, an excellent high quality for a film that would have fallen prey to sanctimony. In this movie, the purest fact may be seen within the eyes of its cows — the mournful gaze of the moms, and the tragically harmless look of the calves which were torn from them.

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.