The bold and striking sci-fi drama THE COW WHO SANG A SONG INTO THE FUTURE is the story of a woman who, to the shock of her family, comes back from the dead, and discovers she has an important purpose to fulfil. This beautiful, meditative masterwork, part surreal eco-drama, part magical sci-fi, is released in UK cinemas on March 24th.
Here’s a look at how the film, the feature debut of Chilean writer-director Francisca Alegría, follows in the footsteps of notable ‘ethereal’ sci-fi films – films in the genre that examine the human condition in relation to alien life and the vastness of the universe.
Arrival (2016): When a dozen UFOs appear, a linguist (Amy Adams), is employed by the military to try to communicate with them – and the difference between those open and accepting to change, and those keen to crush anything vaguely unusual, is revealed. Similarly, TCWSASITF examines how people react to a quite extraordinary event – not only someone thought dead returning to life, but coming back for an extremely important reason. Do humans heed what they hear – or refuse to listen?
Ad Astra (2019): In James Gray’s thoughtful sci-fi drama, Brad Pitt plays an astronaut flying across the solar system to uncover the fate of his father, who went missing on a space mission thirty years previously. Like Ad Astra, TCWSASITF uses a sci-fi framework to look at the complex issues of family, and how a family’s interconnected lives impact on each other in meaningful and often unexpected ways. As rogerbert.com says, TCWSASITF “reminds us we should go through life always thinking about how our choices will affect others”.
High Life (2018): Robert Pattinson plays an astronaut whose attempts to maintain a father-daughter bond with his infant, while working on a prison ship space station, are extremely fraught, in Claire Denis’ enigmatic sci-fi. In TCWSASITF, a mother and her daughter’s relationship is equally strained – after all, the mother, Helen (played by Mía Maestro from Hannibal) is supposed to have died – and she reappears right at a point when the family is in crisis.
Solaris (1972): In TCWSASITF Magdalena, a woman long-deceased, emerges from a river in Chile, and when she encounters her widowed husband, she sends him into a state of shock; similarly, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s existential sci-fi classic, a psychologist sent to a space station to investigate strange goings on there, is alarmed when his dead former wife appears, and he finds himself beguiled by this extraordinary apparition.
Bloody Flicks 