SXSW Film Review: Winona Ryder In ‘The Cow’

The Cow is a film about a mystery that comes with many mysteries of its own, chief among them being the question of why Winona Ryder’s career is so shaped by her past. Stranger Things may have brought her back to the public eye, but it seemed to claim her as an ’80s icon when Ryder only had a walk-on part in that decade’s final reel. Her role in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 ballet psychodrama Black Swan likewise came with a sting in the casting, pitting Ryder as the outgoing grand dame against Natalie Portman as an ingenue snapping at her heels. And here again, much mention is made of her age when Sandra Bullock—seven years her senior—could lead a bigger movie without a peep.

The good news is that Ryder is easily the best thing about Eli Horowitz’s debut feature, a twisty thriller that packs a lot of intelligent ideas into a puzzle structure that, somewhat counterintuitively, takes the viewer’s attention away from them. She plays Kath, a teacher who has hooked up with Max (John Gallagher Jr.), a former student of hers, and is heading with him to a remote cabin that he’s booked online. When they arrive, it appears that another couple is already there: the truculent Al (Owen Teague) and the somewhat more approachable Greta (Brianne Tju). Al won’t give an inch, but Greta lets them in for the night, and together they play a tacky board game called Pillow Talkers (“A game for lovers who have lost the thrill of their mate”). The next day, Kath wakes up to find Max gone and Al in tears—Max, he tells her, has run off with Greta.

As a set-up, it’s intriguing, but by this point there are several distractions along the way, the first of them being the terrible title (it is explained, but the payoff really isn’t worth it). The second is the restlessness of the editing, which, from the beginning, ominously foreshadows the significance of a container in the woods while we’re still trying to get a handle on the characters. The third is the tone; looking for closure, Kath reaches out to Barlow (Dermot Mulroney), a hermetic former tech guy who rents out the cabin. Together they form a soft-focus union as Kath tries to piece together what happened, in scenes that progress from meet-cute to soul-searching heart-to-hearts. At the same time, in a style patented by Memento, the much harsher real story is presented with alternate moments of flashback, in which we see why Max rented that cabin in the first place and also why Greta has a picture of him with her on her phone’s home screen.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling things, but suffice to say that it is a genre film despite the bewildering flim-flam to suggest it might not be (only the scene-stealing Tju seems to have a handle on the levels of pulp intrigue that this film really needs). The denouement is surprisingly dark, too, but although the constant references to age and aging are merited in the end, it’s still so dispiriting to hear so much made of Kath and Max’s age gap. In real life, Gallagher is 37 and Ryder is 50—the same age that Gloria Swanson was when she was cast as a neurotic has-been in Sunset Boulevard.