On Kelly Reichardt's First Cow (2019) and the economy of means that characterizes her filmmaking.

First Cow is a film about friendship, commerce, and the early American frontier, set in the Oregon Territory in the 1820s. It has almost no action, almost no violence, and almost no narrative tension in any conventional sense. It is one of the most absorbing films of the past decade.

Reichardt's method is to find the drama in the mundane: the preparation of food, the negotiation of small transactions, the maintenance of a friendship between two men who have no reason to trust each other and every practical reason to do so.

The first cow of the title is a cow owned by a wealthy British factor. Two drifters begin stealing its milk at night to make and sell small cakes. The stakes are their lives. The film treats these stakes with complete seriousness while also treating the situation with a warmth and humor that are inseparable from the seriousness.

The 1.33:1 aspect ratio — the same square format Reichardt used in Meek's Cutoff — is not aesthetic nostalgia. It's an argument about what the film is interested in: not the panorama of the frontier myth but the small, close, material world of two people trying to survive.