“A beautiful and haunting film.”

Making its world premiere in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Centrepiece section is The Bovine with the Curved Horns, the first feature film from Colombian director Omar E. Ospina Giraldo. The film is set in 1999 in the area surrounding the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, in northeastern Colombia on the Caribbean coast. Ospina Giraldo crafts a film about childhood, economic disparity, and the gradual disappearance of a way of life, blending magical realism with the economic and political history of Colombia. The Bovine with the Curved Horns is often a beautiful and haunting film, especially in the way Ospina Giraldo presents societal change through the eyes of a child who may not completely understand what is happening around him.

Early in the film, a story is told to the children. “My grandmother always told me the same story.”  The tale goes something like this:  Somewhere in the Great Marsh of Santa Marta, fishermen went out into the swamp, but after spending days underneath the sun, they could not catch anything. One night, before returning, they made a wish to the moon that dawn would never come again. The moon fulfilled their wish, and the sun stopped showing its face. The fishermen were happy because they had everything they needed: fish, a canoe, a cast net, and moonlight. But they could also never return home.

This story becomes an important foundation for everything that follows. The Bovine with the Curved Horns is filled with people who leave and may never return, children whose fathers have disappeared to search for a better economic life, and a community that is slowly becoming more empty. The fishermen in the story have everything they supposedly need, but they have lost their homes and families. Likewise, the people of the village are surrounded by the beautiful natural resources of the region, yet economic despair, the rise of gangs and violence, and environmental changes are making it increasingly difficult for them to continue living there.

The main character is Amado, a young boy who lives with his father, mother, grandmother, and baby sibling. Around him, the adults speak about armed groups entering nearby villages. “Those people are dangerous,” they say. People are already moving away, while others who remain are discussing whether they should leave as well. But Amado is still a child. While the adults speak about violence and danger, he plays with the baby and goes about his life. The possibility of armed conflict becomes almost background noise to his childhood, something he hears without necessarily having the ability to comprehend its magnitude.

Ospina Giraldo is particularly effective in showing the world from this perspective. The adults know that changes are happening, while Amado understands his surroundings through stories, images, and myths. We see the mangroves and the people crabbing and fishing. Their lives are dependent upon the natural environment and even upon the rain, as without it, everything begins to dry. But slowly the fishermen leave. The electricity is eventually turned off. A child dies. Fathers of the children disappear. The villages become ghost towns with abandoned and empty buildings. Whether people have left because of fear or economic collapse is less important than the fact that they are simply no longer there.

It takes around twenty minutes before Ospina Giraldo even presents the title of the film. Before it appears, we finally see an image of the titular bovine, a devil-like figure at a watering hole. The image is unexpected, as it wasn’t apparent that the title was anything more than a metaphor to be presented later. There are other tales about devils and transformations as well, including a story about a man who turned into a dog. The titular creature originates with a local villager, who places a cow skull over his head and wanders the streets at night in order to frighten children. Eventually, we learn that the person behind the skull is the son of Mr. Jesus, which adds a metaphorical biblical aspect, that a devil-like creature is the son of Jesus Christ. 

Some of the film’s best sequences occur at night when this bovine figure wanders around the village. Cinematographer Rafael Gonzáles shoots the film in beautiful black and white, and these nighttime scenes are truly eerie. The cow skull almost appears disconnected from the human underneath it, transforming the figure into something supernatural. Ospina Giraldo and Gonzáles use tracking shots and long takes throughout the film, but these nighttime scenes especially show the strength of the filmmaking. Darkness envelops the village, and the lack of electricity makes the bovine appear even more ghostly.

But the devil is not necessarily just a devil. The more the film progresses, the more the bovine seems to become a manifestation of everything that is threatening the village. The armed groups are approaching, fathers are disappearing, and fishermen are leaving. Basic services disappear. People discuss moving away. The devil that the children fear may not be just another person from the village wearing a skull, but instead the terror of the changing reality facing them.

The historical abandonment of rural regions and populations by the Colombian government allowed various armed groups to take over and control civilian populations. In the areas surrounding the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, paramilitary groups connected to far-right politics and narco-trafficking became especially powerful and violent during the 1990s. Ospina Giraldo sets his film directly within this period, but he does not present the political history through exposition or through adults explaining exactly what is occurring. Instead, political violence exists on the edges of Amado’s and the other children’s worlds.

This makes the magical realism particularly important. Myth becomes a way for the children to understand political realities that are otherwise too complicated or horrifying to comprehend. The bovine is frightening, but it can be understood. It has a face, even if that face is a skull. There is also something important about the physical appearance of the bovine itself. At times, the devil looks almost malnourished. Instead of appearing as some magnificent supernatural creature, it looks weak, skeletal, and hungry. The image fits a community where resources are disappearing and where the people themselves are struggling to remain. Even the monster that belongs to this place seems to be dying alongside it.

Ospina Giraldo works with non-professional actors, which adds to the realism. The characters exist within their routines, their stories, and the rhythms of the village. Children play while adults worry. People fish, travel by canoe, tell stories, and wait for others who may or may not return. The director lets these moments develop naturally, and the film is often at its strongest when he simply observes.

Not all of his ideas are equally developed. At times, The Bovine with the Curved Horns feels half-baked in narrative development and in its themes. It’s quite uneven in how it connects environmental changes, economic despair, and armed violence with the bovine devil and other images shown on screen. There are so many ideas existing alongside one another that Ospina Giraldo does not always bring together successfully or intellectually. Some of the symbolism is more evocative than fully thought out and realized.

By the ending, the characters speak about missing these places and people. This is where The Bovine with the Curved Horns becomes most moving. More than anything, the film is an elegy for a place that no longer exists. The stories told to children, the fishermen, the village, the mangroves, and even the devil represent memories of a life that has been transformed by violence, abandonment, economic decay, and the passage of time.

The fishermen in the opening story wished for the dawn never to arrive. They wanted to remain forever in one moment where they had everything they needed. But in doing so, they could never return home. Ospina Giraldo understands the impossibility behind that wish. Childhood cannot persist. Communities cannot remain untouched by history. People leave, landscapes change, and eventually even the places we remember can become something completely different.  

With this theme, The Bovine with the Curved Horns becomes extremely universal. Ospina Giraldo has crafted a beautiful and often eerie first feature that mixes political history with the myths people use to understand it. His ideas do not always completely cohere, but the film’s strongest images and moments remain powerful, as does the fear that one day you may look around and realize that the people and places you once knew no longer exist.