MAGIC FARM - Mark Reviews Movies

Magic Farm, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

Are the obvious jokes of the premise of Magic Farm simply too obvious for writer/director Amalia Ulman? It almost seems as if the concept of making a comedy out of something so blatantly satirical is too obvious for the filmmaker, who instead lets her characters ramble and amble about in the hopes that something funny or insightful might happen.

Here's the setup: A crew of alleged documentarians travel from New York City to Argentina, hoping to profile an internet-famous singer, and they're met with a lot of problems—not the least of which is that they might have traveled to the wrong country. From the start, the group of filmmakers is shown to believe that they're well-meaning but also to be obliviously insensitive to the point of talking and acting like bigots.

The team's leader is Edna (Chloë Sevigny), an "icon" in the world of documentaries, non-fiction TV programming, or informational web series (The movie is never clear about the actual format and medium of this endeavor). She introduces the idea for her new series of movies/shows as one that will find and examine all the "crazy" trends of different cultures, with all of those types of trends only existing outside the United States apparently, and in the middle of reciting her scripted intro, Edna casually drops an offensively dated insult at her producer/romantic partner Dave (Simon Rex) while the camera is rolling.

We quickly learn that none of the crew, with the notable exception of translator Elena (who just happens to be played by Ulman), is to be admired. Upon arriving in a small town in Argentina, Justin (Joe Apollonio), a glorified gofer of sorts, spends his time paying too much for equipment, riding a skateboard, flirting with the owner of the hostel housing the crew, and not doing much by way of any actual work. Actually, he's not too bad, just naïve, so maybe the entire idea that these characters are stereotypically ugly Americans who inherently belittle and mock other cultures isn't even an accurate description of Ulman's satirical purpose with the movie.

Well, there is Jeff (Alex Wolff), at least, who's the cause of the filmmaking crew's woes. When the team decided that this rabbit-suit-wearing singer would be the subject of their next piece, Jeff learned that the musician was based in San Cristóbal. He failed to realize, however, that there are many locations with that name throughout Latin America. Since Edna's project is under financial strain already, it's not as if the crew can just leave without recording a story, so Jeff decides the best option is to fake a different trend.

By the way, it has to do with a doomsday cult that has members singing and dancing while wearing colorful gift-wrapping bows on their heads, because Justin received a complimentary bow while overpaying for SIM cards and the woman who was supposed to pick them up from the airport turns out to be part of an apocalyptic church. Why the crew doesn't just think to go to that church and interview some of its members for a real story is a bit of an oversight on their part—but mostly on the part of Ulman, who doesn't seem to have thought out, along with a consistent sense of humor, any semblance of a story here.

Instead, a lot of this has to do with the crew's assorted romantic entanglements or prospects. There's Justin's flirtations with the kind hostel owner (played by Guillermo Jacubowicz). There's Jeff's immediate infatuation with Manchi (Camila del Campo), the daughter of a local woman (played by Valeria Lois) who knows the church lady the crew was supposed to meet and, for the scheme to invent a phony musical trend, some local musician. Finally, there's Elena, who is pregnant and doesn't want anyone to know who's on the other side of that equation, because it could cause a lot of additional trouble for Edna, the project, and her career.

Ulman's screenplay for Magic Farm raises a lot of ideas and subsequently drops the more promising ones, including reducing and shifting Edna from the ringleader of this questionable project to the strict boss who's very concerned about journalistic ethics. The actual faking of the apocalyptic song-and-dance group barely figures into the story, apart from an audition scene and when the shooting of a music video is interrupted by a crop duster. There's plenty of comedic potential in this setup, these characters, and the basic idea of exploiting people's culture for entertainment, but it's simply not realized in this movie.

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