Avaliações do Metacritic

The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.

Providing many questions and very few answers, Alegría and co-writers Fernanda Urrejole and Manuela Infante make a point to show that life can emerge from death, imploring the audience to stop fixating on the damages done in the past and focus on saving the present and future.

Though the film can at times feel long-winded—a common predicament when transitioning from shorts to features—it is a heady and hypnotic parable for the irreparable ecological harm humans have committed, while insisting that it’s not too late to connect and reconcile with the land that nurtures us.

Solidly grounded, teeming with thought-provoking ideas, wonderfully atmospheric, and often visually striking, this magical realist eco-fable about a dead mother who returns to transform the lives of her dysfunctional family pays the price for its own high ambition and is simply unable to sustain the intensity until the end. But until then, it’s a hypnotic and entrancing ride.

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is mysterious and elegiac, a tale of warning about a collapsing ecosystem and about deep family wounds.

This feature debut represents a big swing for the Chilean director, a thoughtful, deliberate drama bursting with ecological and personal imagery. A patient narrative rewarding the patient viewer, Cow‘s an abstract portrait of a family and environment in crisis.

As a folkloric meditation on the relationship between human and environment, mother and child, Alegría’s film has an earthly mystical quality to it, moving through its minimal plot with fluidity and enticement.

While, yes, TCWSSF is a dreamy magical realist fable with an environmental message, Alegría weaves into her tale an emotionally satisfying, gripping family drama, with singing cows – and fish too.

Blending science fiction and magical realism, environmental catastrophe and family secrets, Francisca Alegría’s heady mystery is an ambitious and murkily atmospheric debut.

The film is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message.