"You can almost taste the dirt in your mouth and smell the smoke on the wind when losing yourself in this quietly powerful nineteenth-century-set frontier tale from director and co-writer Kelly Reichardt (working with Jon Raymond to adapt his own novel ‘The Half-Life’). It’s a painterly, spare and fitfully witty story of survival and companionship set in the 1820s in The Oregon Territory – the precursor to the US state where indie filmmaker Reichardt has made several earthy films, including ‘Wendy and Lucy’. The film is a beguiling window into a distant world.
"Reichardt keeps her focus tight: she’s most interested in the emerging friendship between Cookie (John Magaro), a sweet American travelling as a helper with hard-nosed fur trappers, and King-Lu (Orion Lee), a man from northern China who, intriguingly, has found himself on the run in the wooded wilds of the Pacific Northwest. They’re the ultimate odd couple. Cookie and King-Lu become friends, bunk up together in a cabin near a muddy trading post and stumble into a scam which involves them secretly milking the region’s only cow at night. By day they use the same milk to make a small fortune selling biscuits and cakes. Everything in ‘First Cow’ feels like a beginning (although it’s not, of course, for the Indigenous Peoples whose presence and language Reichardt honours along the way).
"It’s hard not to view ‘First Cow’ as a poetic blueprint for modern America: this wild corner of the Pacific Northwest is a place where you can hear plummy British voices alongside rough Scottish and American accents, hear a Chinese immigrant complain of being chased by Russians and see early capitalism in action. Along the way, Reichardt gives us a friendship that endures way beyond earthly lives. You come out blinking into the present, with these kinds of ghosts of the past lingering long in the mind." - Time Out
"We might go into a Kelly Reichardt movie thinking we'll be told a story, but we emerge with our consciousness subtly and radically altered." - Washington Post