There’s nothing magical about Amalia Ulman’s sophomore feature, Magic Farm. If there’s a spell that it casts, it’s to dazzle you with its comic ineptitude and plethora of unwatchable characters. What a way to start this year’s Sundance! Perhaps the early debut (and late embargo) was to set a bar so low that everything else in a relatively weak year would look like they belong in the Library of Congress.
Magic Farm, Ulman’s follow-up to 2021’s El Planeta, feels experimental in that it offers jokes delivered with no confidence and without clear punchlines. The film follows a group of ugly, self-absorbed Americans, all part of a crappy news magazine program exploring bizarre trends in far-off subcultures. Sundance mainstay Chloë Sevigny plays the show’s bitchy host Edna, who knows the show is terrible but tries to stick it out, anyway. Along with her husband/producer (Simon Rex) and the team’s moronic, immature crew: whining man-baby Jeff (Alex Wolff), and best friends Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Elena (Ulman), they set out to cover a strange bunny ear-wearing musician. But because they’re all idiots, they whiff on the country completely and wind up in Argentina at a rundown hostel with something mildly resembling a farm. There’s a horse, anyway, that Edna occasionally speaks to. It’d be a more interesting movie if the horse spoke back.
From there, it’s a whole lot of nothing going on in Magic Farm as these awful people expose their personal quirks to the locals, good-hearted people dragged into the crew’s bullshit. With no story to tell, they decide to concoct out of whole cloth a phony trend of people wearing ribbons on their heads. It’s stupid. Edna’s husband flies back to the city to deal with a secret sexual misconduct case that should sink the show for good. The production is over-budget and ridiculous; the locals hired for it aren’t any good. Basically, the whole thing is doomed and that could be funny in the right hands, but Ulman’s script, which I’m guessing was aiming for a surreal “anything can happen” vibe, feels random in the worst possible way.
At 93-minutes, Magic Farm wears on you like a lead blanket and probably could’ve accomplished a lot more with half the time. It still wouldn’t be any good, but at least it would be less punishing. Ulman does get a few sweet, naturalistic performances by lesser-known members of the cast: Guillermo Jacubowicz as the kind hotel manager, a lonely widower who could be open to love for the first time in years. There’s also model/actress Camila del Campo, a fiery, restless spirit whose only mistake is that she gets involved with Jeff and proves she’s more of a man than he’ll ever be.
These forays into their personal lives (there’s also a medical emergency storyline that goes NOWHERE) won’t keep anybody hooked. Magic Farm is a tragic misfire of poor concepts and terrible characters that we can’t wait to shut the barn door on for good.
