First Cow: Kelly Reichardt offers a sparkling, perceptive portrait of early America

Alongside her earlier film, Meek’s Cutoff, it deserves to be held up as a new standard of historical filmmaking

Dir: Kelly Reichardt. Starring: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Ewen Bremner, Scott Shepherd, Gary Farmer, Lily Gladstone. 12A, 122 mins

First Cow, a film of sparkling tenderness and affection, opens on a scene of death. A young dogwalker (Alia Shawkat) stumbles across a piece of bone jutting out of the ground. She starts to dig with her bare hand; it’s almost nurturing, the way she pushes back the soil. Eventually, the camera pulls back and we see the full extent of her discovery. Here are two skeletons, resting against each other, with no sign of violence against their bodies. They are at peace.

We then cut to a second pair of hands, this time foraging for mushrooms, as the narrative begins in earnest. First Cow is a period film, set in 1820, in the disputed Oregon Country in America’s Pacific northwest. It’s shot in a boxy aspect ratio suggestive of old sketches or oil paintings. The skeletons belong to two frontiersmen, Cookie (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee). Cookie, whose few skills were acquired after a period of indentured servitude to a Boston baker, is a soft-spoken naïf with eyes as big and brown as the dairy cow whose milk he steals on a nightly basis.