The Missing Cow (2023) 'DIFF' Movie Review

Bhaskar Hazarika’s new short film, The Missing Cow, fuses maternal anxieties with fundamental fears around sustenance. Hazarika orchestrates his wildest swings into genre terrain with this short that doesn’t cohere together as much as it aims for. Sabiya (Lima Das), a widowed mother of two, lives in a remote village in Assam. Her little girl stays with her while her elder son is a migrant laborer stuck in Bihar. A cow that she heavily relies on plays truant, and Hazarika conflates disappearances horror at the unimaginable and the bizarre to outré levels.

As a storyteller, Hazarika has rarely been shy of the morbid. Anyone remotely familiar with his work is acquainted with his deep interest in the most fantastical desires and wickedly uncertain emotional moorings. The Missing Cow reflects a mother’s emotionally troubled mental state rendered fraught and extremely volatile by the pandemic. Hazarika brings a heightened touch of the grotesque that works, although to debatable degrees. The choice of treatment yokes up old questions around visual excess that stretch the limits of fear and delusion. Hazarika is adept at evoking dread through an effective sound design and the early brooding shots of an empty cavernous patch of land.

The film keeps returning to this spot, each time hardening the queasy edge. But the effects are considerably and gradually worn off because the screenplay ultimately falls back on a bag of predictable tricks. Sabiya awaits her son’s return, who informs her he will be back soon on a train the government has started for migrant workers. She is thrilled and delighted, but things turn awry soon as a stroke of foreboding hits with shockingly abrasive extremes, areas Hazarika has never ventured and is better left undisclosed for a surprise. It is designed as a jolt.

But The Missing Cow’s sense of surprise is diluted by its predictability, hinging on events plucked from recent headlines, relayed through an uninspired news bulletin, that defuses the punctuating sparks of atmospherics. In its need for sociopolitical urgency taped hurriedly onto the mood piece, The Missing Cow sacrifices the elemental tension established previously. To make provocation work, the story demands to mine more of the psychological than just wildly veer off into visuals that make high leaps.

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It doesn’t help that Lima Das, who had such an utterly singular, enigmatic presence that was weaponized to haunting perfection in Hazarika’s previous film, Aamis, is stiffly miscast here. Her performance lacks credibility, the sense of being lived in, the blame for which can also be directed to the screenplay, giving off a strong sense of being removed from the parts the film is situated in. She looks vaguely interested, and in scenes that explicitly demand an outburst, it feels obtrusively projected rather than earned in any authenticity. Sabiya has a lot of pent-up anxieties, and when the film leads towards the climactic moment, Das’ contorted expressions in a tight closeup wholly miss out on the thrust beneath the bursting forth her character is pushed up against.

The Missing Cow needed a dose of more thematic ambition and textured characterization to buttress its daring steps. Instead, it feels too fleeting and slight. What ultimately transpires is a film that thinks it can make an audacious jump but doesn’t even know how to land.