This article contains spoilers for the film Cow (2021)
Cinema, according to the late critic Roger Ebert, is “a machine that generates empathy”. There is no film that better captures this truth than Andrea Arnold’s Cow.
Set on a British dairy farm, Arnold’s narration-free documentary captures four years in the life of a cow called Luma. The film opens with Luma giving birth to a daughter and ends with her being shot in the head at point-blank range with a bolt gun. In between, Cow documents the life-and-death cycle of the dairy industry.
