If you’ve ever found yourself watching a Terrence Malick movie and thinking, “This would be better if it had fewer dinosaurs and more pastry theft,” congratulations — Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is your reward. And by reward, I mean punishment. A film so slow, so oppressively quiet, it feels less like a story and more like an endurance test cooked up by sadists with MFA degrees.
The plot — and I use the word “plot” in the loosest possible sense — follows Cookie Figowitz, a soft-spoken cook for a group of 1820s fur trappers, and King-Lu, a Chinese immigrant with dreams of entrepreneurial grandeur. Their big plan? Steal milk from the only cow in the territory and use it to make oily cakes for profit. That’s it. That’s the story. Not a metaphor. Not a side quest. That’s the whole thing. It’s like Breaking Bad if Walt and Jesse were 19th-century vegans who took four hours to boil water.
The titular cow — yes, the bovine gets top billing — doesn’t even show up until 45 minutes into the movie. Forty-five minutes. That’s how long Reichardt makes you wait to meet a farm animal. Most directors would use that time to build tension or character development. Reichardt uses it to show people walking. Through forests. Through mud. Occasionally standing. Always thinking. Never blinking.
Cookie (John Magaro) is a sweet, passive man who moves through life like a ghost too polite to haunt. King-Lu (Orion Lee) is slightly more talkative, which in a Reichardt film means he says three full sentences before disappearing into a thicket of philosophical mumbling. Their chemistry is what you’d get if Eeyore and the ghost of Buster Keaton opened a bakery in purgatory.
They bond over dreams of making enough money to get out of Oregon Territory — a place so gray and sodden it feels like a post-apocalyptic farmers’ market. Their plan involves sneaking onto the property of a wealthy Englishman (Toby Jones), milking his prized cow under the cover of darkness, and using that stolen liquid gold to make “oily cakes” they sell to the local settlers. It’s the most low-stakes crime spree in cinema history. Imagine Ocean’s Eleven if the heist involved lactose and a wooden spoon.
And here’s the kicker — the oily cakes are a hit. People lose their minds over them. We’re told they’re delicious, though the cakes themselves look like sad, fried sponges. Settlers line up, whispering about the “flavor,” as if they’ve just discovered cocaine in cruller form. One guy bites into one and moans like he’s in a Cialis ad. Never has fried dough been treated with such religious reverence.
But because this is a Kelly Reichardt film, joy cannot last. Suspicion creeps in. The cow’s owner starts to wonder why his prized udder goddess isn’t producing milk like she used to. Cookie and King-Lu get sloppy. The world closes in, though slowly, like a very tired python.
Let’s talk pacing. If this film were any slower, it’d be running backward. Every scene is marinated in silence. Conversations are spread out like funeral flowers — sparse, solemn, and full of decay. Reichardt’s camera lingers on everything: mossy trees, still water, lonely boots by a fire. It’s as if she directed the film by whispering “slower” to the editor every time they tried to cut.
There’s a strange obsession with “naturalism” here — the kind of quiet, contemplative style that critics mistake for genius because they’re too embarrassed to admit they were bored out of their skulls. Long, uninterrupted shots of people doing nothing. Milking cows. Frying batter. Staring at the sky like it owes them rent. It’s like Reichardt found an abandoned history museum diorama and just started filming the mannequins.
The performances are fine — if you enjoy the subtle art of murmuring. John Magaro’s Cookie is the sort of character who seems like he’s been apologizing for existing since birth. Orion Lee brings a gentle wit to King-Lu, though his charisma is constantly mugged by the oppressive tone of the film. Toby Jones, the one actor who seems vaguely aware he’s in a movie, shows up just long enough to remind you what energy looks like.
And then there’s the cow. The silent star. She walks on screen like a queen and immediately becomes the most compelling presence in the film. She doesn’t say much — obviously — but she doesn’t have to. In a movie where everyone else is too timid to make eye contact with a tree, the cow’s unbothered majesty steals the show. She’s regal, aloof, and probably wondering why the humans around her keep whispering about pastries.
Thematically, First Cow wants to explore male friendship, capitalism, the American dream, and class inequality — but mostly it wants you to sit still and shut up. Reichardt has no interest in entertaining you. She wants you to feel the dirt under your fingernails, the weight of colonial disappointment, the crushing futility of living off the land when the land doesn’t want you there. Which is fine — but does it have to be this painfully dull?
By the end, things go south. Someone dies. Someone else escapes. There’s a chase scene that moves with the velocity of a sleepy donkey on melatonin. The inevitable betrayal isn’t explosive — it’s more like a sigh. The film ends the way it began: with silence, ambiguity, and a sense that somewhere, a cow is chewing grass and thinking, “This script needed more action.”
Final Thoughts:
First Cow is the cinematic equivalent of a gluten-free muffin — earthy, well-intentioned, and mostly air. It’s the kind of film where nothing happens, but it’s important that nothing happens. A critic’s darling, sure, but to the rest of us, it’s a two-hour nap with period costumes and some stolen milk.
If you want to feel something — anything — I recommend watching the trailer at 1.5x speed with “Yakety Sax” playing in the background. At least then, the cow might finally get somewhere.
