Film Review: THE COW: Fine Update on Traditional Mad Scientist Trope [SXSW 2022]

The Cow Review

The Cow (2021) Film Review, from the 29th Annual South by Southwest Film Festival, a movie directed by Eli Horowitz, written by Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby, and starring Winona Ryder, Dermot Mulroney, John Gallagher Jr., Owen Teague, and Brianne Tju.

The Cow is a fairly clever thriller hybrid of The Invisible Man meets The Cabin in the Woods.

There is some tension in the air right off the bat when the film opens with a couple driving on a road through the Redwoods for a weekend getaway. Here one can recognize the trope right away. These two snipe at each other, but without any real bite; one gets the feeling it’s all been said before in any number of ways.

These characters are set up pretty much as per the trope — at cross-purposes. Max (John Gallagher, Jr.) had pre-arranged their holiday. He seems keyed up with excitement, even nervous. Wearing a heavy metal t-shirt, he’s like a big kid, teasing and provocative. By contrast, Kath (Winona Ryder), a floral shop owner, is resigned and distracted. At any moment one might expect Max to say, Are we there yet, or Kath to correct his grammar.

The tension ramps up when Kath and Max arrive at the remote cabin after dark and discover the cabin has apparently been double-booked. A brooding young man (Owen Teague) stomps out, and definitely in no mood to negotiate. In fact, he’s downright confrontational. Call the owner? No can do. Too far out, bad cell reception (yes, of course). This is a clever device on the part of the writers, as there is no accounting for this young man’s antagonism.

Nonetheless, when anyone else might face off the rude young man, Max remains inexplicably jovial. Kath, on the other hand, clearly hears alarm bells go off in her head, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of there. But the matter is settled when the other half, a petite Asian lady (Brianne Tju), joins them. Her reaction is no less odd; with casual authority, insists that they stay.

All in all, it’s a peculiar exchange, and the mysterious couple are less than amiable hosts, full of veiled insults and sly, prying questions. The director keeps the pressure on in this way, and it moves beyond, for the moment, any hint of the “cabin” trope. The three stodgily resist Max’s relentless cheer, however, and the audience may be tempted to fear the worst for the quartet in the long night ahead.

But Kath awakens to bright sunshine the next morning, alone, with all of her body parts. She finds her brooding host, crying as though his heart is breaking. He shares the news that Max has run off with his partner without so much as a goodbye. With no further explanation and nothing else to go on, Kath leaves, and good riddance to bad rubbish. After all, skipping off would not exactly be out of character for Max.

In most situations, an independent, self-respecting adult female would be content to let it go at that. But despite a few stabs at plausible rationalizing, the situation nags at Kath. She starts with the obvious: she calls the cabin owner (Dermot Mulroney) to fish for information about the home-wrecker Asian lady. The scheme backfires when the scientist shows up at her shop — a grizzly-hot mountain-man type, also scientist who dropped out of research, so he says, for ethical reasons. There’s a spark between them, and they team up, of course. The game is on.

It’s not difficult to predict some of the events that follow. There’s some suspense as the plot thickens, but the strength of the performances gives it some energy, and it coasts along.

Long story short: Max never absconded. The couple held Max prisoner, comatose, in a nearby shipping container as a healthy, “clean” source of body fluids — in short, a cow — for immortality experiments conducted by the broody guy’s dad — the mountain man scientist himself. But Kath shows major moxie. She manages to lock everyone inside the container.

Certainly, the director and writer managed to avoid the modern movie thriller tropes, but by default was left with an older one: the obsessive scientist driven mad through the pursuit of his research, much like Dr. Frankenstein or the character of Griffin in The Invisible Man. The measured exposition and careful timeline cross-cutting maintains the decent amount of suspense there is. And, as noted, the performances by these talented veterans move the plot admirably. At the end of the day, while the story doesn’t push the envelope, there’s plenty on the ball to appreciate in this modernized B-picture.

Rating: 6/10

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