The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future review – magical realist fable climbs to a superb peak

This feature film debut from Chilean director Francisca Alegría aims high from the start, tackling climate breakdown, gender identity, grief, and motherhood, amongst other things, filtered through an unmistakably Latin American magical realist sensibility. If The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future occasionally aims a little too high for its own good, then it at least backs that up with some exceptional filmmaking.

Far too many films that emerge from first-time directors are – to paraphrase Roger Ebert – concerned with what they’re about rather than how they are about it, and certainly there are times in the first half hour where you feel Alegría is underlining her Big Themes with bright highlighter, though perhaps this is a sop to anxious funders too scared to push the boat out (the film, like so many festival favourites these days, emerges from an international co-production that includes Chile, France and Germany).

But once the film settles into its strange, ethereal groove in the back half, there are some truly spectacular images to be found: the titular singing cow emerging in the dusk; swarms of birds covering the sky; a daughter and her grandmother, reunited across generations. If this sounds quite high-concept and FX-heavy for a small arthouse film, it really isn’t, with Alegría relying more on our suspension of disbelief and editing for the effect to work (in true magical realist style).

The plot emerges gradually – we see a mysterious middle-aged woman drag herself out of a river in which dying fish line the banks, and the next scene we see a trans daughter struggling with home life, deadnamed by her mother. The family return to their dairy farm on which they grew up to take care of the ailing grandfather, where they find the place in need of care, collapsing around them. Slowly, it emerges that the mysterious woman we see at the start is the family’s grandmother, who had committed suicide decades earlier by jumping in the river. She’s not quite haunting her family, but her mute presence, often unseen, certainly seems to unsettle everyone.

Throughout, Alegría and her cinematographer Inti Briones use stealthy, elegant tracking shots, often placed at chest or waist height rather than eye level, suggesting a slightly otherworldly point-of-view. Splitting the difference between Terrence Malick magic hour and John Carpenter-esque dread, these shots seem to cut our characters out of their surroundings, as if highlighting their sense of isolation against the natural world.

Modernity, Alegría suggests, is no defence against forthcoming climate breakdown, with rational thought an ill-suited buttress against forces we only barely comprehend. It is instead in reconciliation with our past that we’ll find the answers for the future; the film’s climactic scenes bring everything full circle, the soundtrack (choral and seemingly part-traditional but electronically modulated) meshing with its hallucinogenic visual imagination. A rocky start eventually climbs to a superb peak.

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is released in UK cinemas on 24 March.