Magic Farm Review

They can be an easy target. Addicted to their mobile phones and social media, and seemingly entitled, over-sensitive and self-absorbed, it’s not difficult to poke fun IRL at Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). Accurately portraying them on screen, on the other hand, is a whole lot harder, often drifting into cliché, but it turns out to be a real strong point in Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm.

The Gen Z-ers here are a film crew from a trendy New York media company travelling the world in search of bizarre subcultures and committing them to bite-sized videos. With experienced – and frequently despairing – journalist Edna (Chloe Sevigny) leading the way, they head off to Argentina in search of a singer known as Super Carlitos, who’s become a viral sensation by performing in a rabbit suit. It’s all the idea of naïve producer Jeff (Alex Wolff), who believes he’s found somebody who can give them an “in” with the singer but, when they arrive at their destination of the small town of San Cristobal, they soon discover they’re in the wrong place. It’s a common name for cities all over South America. With no subject for their film, they have to create something from scratch and, as it happens, this down-at-heel little town does have a story all of its own. Assuming they can find it…

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One of the most satisfying aspects of Magic Farm is Ulman’s deliberate decision to cast against type. Wolff is best known for serious performances in intense titles like Hereditary (2018), but reveals himself to be a natural in something lighter and with a more satirical tone. His constantly self-pitying Jeff is so brilliantly irritating you’d quite happily shake him warmly by the throat. Sevigny relishes her cynical journalist, especially in the earlier New York-set scenes where her distaste for both her job and crew keeps rising to the surface. They’re so inept they can’t see what’s under their noses, but when the trip to Argentina shows that Edna’s not much better. The sad thing is that Sevigny doesn’t get anything like enough screen time.

Ulman, who also wrote the script, displays a knack for leading her audience willingly up the garden path and then either leaving them stranded or taking them in an entirely unexpected direction. For the first half of the film, it works like a dream: you’re convinced that, despite the incompetence of the crew, one of them might just twig what’s actually happening in the town. But, as the story develops, the culture clash comes to the fore and the savvy locals continue to outwit their unexpected and gullible visitors left, right and centre, that hope diminishes and the same happens to the satirical element of the narrative, which is never quite strong enough to stand up on its own.

By the time the crew leaves town, complete with a “fake it to make it” video so silly you can’t believe anybody would pay money for it, there’s a sense of something incomplete. Magic Farm is an idea with the potential for consistently tart humour and sharper satire, yet, try as it might, it is unable to see it through.