'The Herd (2014)' is a grim short film that's unmistakably a metaphor for modern-day dairy farms that's intended to expose their cruelty. It's typical that people need to see something anthropomorphised in order to truly empathise with it; animals shouldn't need to be understood on human terms to be viewed as the sentient beings they are. Though I'm not vegan myself, I'm more than sympathetic to the cause. I don't think something like this would convert someone who isn't, yet its an admirable effort even though it does make a few mistakes along the way. Firstly, although the piece could be interpreted as also being about human trafficking (a less-intended reading, for sure), it undeniably treats its heroines like animals. That is the point, after all, but the allegory is so obvious that it's a little hard to engage with the horror on a surface level, a level which is - in this case - arguably even worse than the analogous one the piece mainly operates on. That's because the short is filled from front to back with intolerable cruelty based primarily around violence against women. Its characters are subject to rape (artificial insemination), beatings, verbal abuse and are generally treat like they aren't even human, being bred for and drained of their breast milk. There are some really confronting images here, including one particularly upsetting sequence I won't spoil, and it sometimes seems as though piece is making its primary point at the cost of degrading its female characters. IMDB's trivia section states it is the first 'feminist vegan horror movie' (a dubious claim at best), but there isn't really anything feminist about it. I suppose there is a small element of feminism in the sense that we're in the perspective of women and want to see them rise up against their captors (who aren't all men, by the way), but it's far more concerned with being vegan than anything else and it feels like we're rooting for people (as stand-ins for animals) rather than women in particular. The problem with that is it's achieved by degrading (most of) its female characters and borders on being, for lack of a better term, torture porn for its majority (though the torture certainly isn't meant to be entertaining here). None of this is to take away from the potency of its message, nor the purity of its intentions. However, it does muddy the waters a bit when it comes to evaluating its success. The picture is viscerally uncomfortable for its entirety, very much by design, and its allegory is so on the nose that it's nigh on impossible to ignore. It's very likely that you'll at least think about what you're doing before you take your next sip of milk, though it's unlikely this short alone will turn you away from doing so entirely. It's also difficult to imagine that anyone other than the incredibly young or the willfully ignorant don't already know what sort of stuff goes on behind the scenes at Old MacDonald's farm. The short plays out in two halves, with the first being dedicated solely to suffering and the second taking on a more conventional genre approach. The latter half is a little underwhelming in its execution, and its concept feels somewhat fanciful in the sense that it sort of goes against the nihilistic tone of the overall affair. It's bittersweet rather than entirely celebratory, but it feels a little ingenuine (it doesn't help that the moment that kicks it off rings entirely false). The core message still comes across, though, and the flick is generally crafted rather well. It looks, feels and even sounds grungy, the equivalent of that bathroom the characters in 'Saw (2004)' wake up in. The atmosphere is bleak throughout and you can tell that the film itself is just angry. It's not an enjoyable or, even, entertaining watch, but it is confronting and it holds your attention from beginning to end. It's a little problematic in some areas, but it has its heart in the right place and is relatively good overall.
