La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life. 

Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?

As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen. 

All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.

If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined. 

That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance. 

This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond