Mark Reviews Movies: GUNDA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 10, 2020

The animals in Gunda—a pig and its offspring, some chickens, a herd of cows—stop seeming real after enough time looking at them. The piglets' motions are so jerky that they almost look like puppets or animation. In close-up, the chickens' legs and claws appear as if they belong to some great beast of old, and the way the birds stalk through the grass gives the impression of some ferocious hunters.

As for the cows, they seem to notice director Viktor Kosakovskiy's camera, but they lose interest quickly, going back to trying to swat flies from their eyes. What does a cow know of a camera, anyway?

What do these animals know of anything, really? That's a question that comes to mind repeatedly during this serene documentary, which simply observes these animals as they go about their daily lives on assorted farms. One might continually hope that the animals will do something more interesting, but a pig has no concept of or care for what's interesting. We have to forgive it for that.

How much slack do we offer Kosakovskiy, though? He has made an undeniably beautiful movie—shot in stark black-and-white, subtly using slow-motion to hypnotic effect, occasionally framed in such a way that common animals do seem anything but. The filmmaker never attempts to give these animals a sense of humanity—no thinking or feelings provided by narration—or to sentimentalize them by way of music (Save for one machine, the only sounds are natural).

It's a movie about the behavior of some pigs, chickens, and cows on a farm. Any thinking beyond that belongs only to the viewer.

Thoughts will spring to mind, of course, because Kosakovskiy gives us plenty of time and relative quiet to ponder what, if anything beyond food and movement, is going on in the animals' brains. We might give the animals personalities, as a one-legged chicken stares through an impassable fence toward inaccessible roaming space, or voices, as the piglets scramble for milk.

Gunda, though, is resolutely objective and, as a result, somewhat impenetrable. Animals only know what they need and what's right in front of them. There's nothing more to this movie's depiction of life on a farm until its admittedly haunting final minutes. When something that was right in front of an animal is taken away, does anything else remain?

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