Andrea Arnold’s 2021 film Cow is, ostensibly, a documentary about a dairy cow. But it offers an experience unlike any other documentary I have watched. Shot over four years on a dairy farm in Kent, England, its portrayal of a cow’s life eschews the reassuring framework of the human perspective. There is no narration, no talking heads, no facts and figures guiding us—yet it doesn’t feel like it’s just a typical animal documentary that has had those elements subtracted. It feels like a fictional film starring animal actors. It feels like a cinema verité documentary that a cow would make for other cows. The few humans who appear onscreen are insignificant, transient, and above all distant. The cow is our constant. “It’s not really a documentary. I don’t think it is. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a documentary,” Arnold said in an interview with the Playlist, before admitting, “I don’t know why it’s not… What is a documentary, maybe?” 

Before it can be anything else, film is a sensory experience. Few filmmakers make me feel this as acutely as Andrea Arnold, who renders environments so vividly that I remember them in tastes and textures as much as images, in ambient sounds as much as dialogue. Plants that crack through concrete, potholes big enough that rain turns them into ponds, the tinny sound of a pop song in someone else’s headphones. The crunch of leaves and squelch of mud and taste of cotton in the heathery moors of her adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and the cold, too-wet stickiness of the pork ribs thrown on the ground and scavenged by the hungry children in her Oscar-winning short film Wasp. 

Arnold’s environments are not just urban or rural, but often a third kind of space: not the cleanly partitioned suburbs, but the liminal spaces in which city and country blur together, exposing the falseness of the urban/rural dichotomy. This reflects her own upbringing. Raised by a young single mother in public housing in Kent, her childhood was full of curious juxtapositions of post-industrial decay and pre-agricultural wilderness. She would wander between “estates and chalk pits and deserted old industrial spaces and woods and motorways,” she wrote for the Guardian. “Out of this grew a deep love of insects and birds and animals and plants. Stray estate dogs, the Traveller ponies chained by the motorway, the fish and frogs in the water-filled bomb site, wild strawberries on the banks of the chalk pits. I can conjure up these places vividly now. The smells and sounds and feels and colors.”