The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future Review: Magical Realism in Service of Sincerity

Francisca Alegría’s The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message. And in this case, that the message of ecological redemption feels too little too late makes the film’s failure to give it resonance all the more frustrating. Between its half-realized characters, unresolved plotlines, and perfunctory stab at magical realism, it’s hard to take this story as seriously as it takes itself.

Set in present-day rural Chile, the film opens with Magdalena (Mía Maestro) washing up on the banks of a river alongside the bodies of countless fish. The woman, it turns out, drowned decades earlier after driving her motorcycle into the water. Having aged not a day since the accident—or was it suicide?—she wanders into the village where she used to live. And it’s there that Magdalena’s former husband, Pablo (Benjamin Soto), the owner of an industrialized dairy farm, catches sight of her and has what initially appears to be a heart attack.

Meanwhile, their daughter, Cecilia (Leonor Varela), works as a surgeon in an unnamed city. Taking after her stuck-in-his-ways father, she refuses to recognize the gender of her trans daughter (Enzo Ferrada Rosati), calling her “Tomàs” for the entirety of the film. After she gets a call about her father’s hospitalization from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle), the family reunites at the dairy farm. Magdalena gently “haunts” the farm as an ecological disaster, tenuously linked to a pulp factory dumping toxins upriver, puts the cows in jeopardy.

It may be that magical realism, which tends to hinge on mystery and ambiguity, doesn’t lend itself to propounding coherent political messages. Or it may be that the film doesn’t commit to the ghost story angle enough to work out its ground rules. Magdalena’s presence seems to disrupt cellphone signals as if she’s somehow against them, but inconsistently, and the newfangled devices fascinate her. She doesn’t ever speak but might be telepathic. As a ghost, she’s immaterial but still capable of having sex with an eco-protestor. She represents the mute protest of long-suffering Mother Nature but remains obsessed with motorcycles.

These lackadaisical conceits end up feeling artificially mapped on to the family drama, to the degree that the viewer may wonder if they weren’t calculated to satisfy international audiences’ conflation of Latin America with the genre. And the clumsiness of the film’s magical realism is never more glaring than in a scene where Cecilia wanders into a pasture at sundown and the cows fulfill the promise of The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future’s overwrought title by singing to her of their imminent death, thanks to the toxic river.

Maybe there’s something inherently absurd about singing cows, or maybe it works better on paper than on film. But this image of the cows singing their elegiac plaint in oddly childlike voices, the words lip-synced to their cud-chewing, looks patently ridiculous. That wouldn’t make any difference if the film ever broke its stance of painful sincerity and embraced the absurd.

What insufficient time The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future devotes to its genre trappings nonetheless hinders it from bringing its familial and ecological conflicts to convincing resolutions. There’s even a completely extraneous character, Cecilia’s younger daughter, Alma (Laura del Río Ríos), whose sole attribute is that she likes optical instruments. We come to learn that Pablo is likely responsible for driving Magdalena to suicide, but the fallout of this revelation never materializes—unless we interpret the toxic river as karmic retribution. Except that it’s already been presented as the fault of the pulp factory.

Most egregious, while Magdalena seems to accept “Tomàs” for who she is, Cecilia never follows suit (though she has a symbolic emotional moment with the motherless calves) and the viewer never does learn what name “Tomàs” prefers to be called by. And because Alegría’s film views familial redemption and ecological redemption as two sides of the same coin, deficiencies in portraying the former are also deficiencies in portraying the latter.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge the film’s ambition. Its lack of focus feels like the byproduct of a filmmaker trying to say everything there is to say in the too-restricted format of one feature-length film. Instead of it being about familial guilt and redemption, or the intricate balance of an ecosystem, or animal exploitation and factory farming, or the past coming back to haunt us, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future strives to address all of that, and all at once. Alegría’s insistence on the interdependence—like that of an ecosystem—of these seemingly disparate themes is commendable. That’s why it’s a shame that the film comes across as manufactured to convince and yet remains, precisely for this reason, unconvincing.