I won’t ever look at cows the same way again: Andrea Arnold’s Cow reviewed

The latest film from Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, American Honey) is a feature-length documentary about a cow, starring a cow, with almost nothing else in it, apart from this cow. It feels like a test. Can I watch a cow for 93 minutes? What does this cow do that’s so interesting? I see cows all the time from the train and they just sort of lounge about, ruminating, don’t they? But this wants you to look, really look, at what it is to be a cow. And you do and you will invest. (Oh, Luma.)

Arnold spent four years, off and on, filming Luma, a cow at a dairy farm in Kent. Luma looms from the dark background of one of the film’s stills like a Rembrandt. You’d look, really look, if she were hanging in the Rijksmuseum, Arnold seems to be saying. Luma has black smudges on her nose and a dot beneath an eye.