Stray dogs, lone horses, and rampant horniness may not make for pleasing documentary subject matter, but they add to the sense of joie de vivre that motivates its undertaking — said no one ever. Documentaries typically fall into two overlapping camps, the sensationalist and the sensorial, and where the latter seeks out the textures of lived experience, the former amplifies and invents them. Training her camera on this creative propensity, Amalia Ulman stages a meta-documentary of sorts with Magic Farm, her follow-up to 2021’s El Planeta and a thinly veiled critique of Americans touring the global South. Five clueless New Yorkers seeking new content for their television gristmill hop on a plane to San Cristóbal, hoping to mine something out of local singer-sensation named Super Carlitos (who wears bunny ears and is, as of this writing, fictional). But their sloppy prep work results in the equivalent of mistaking the state of Washington for Washington D.C., and they end up not in Mexico, but way down south in Argentina.
Predictably, things go south there as well. The producer, Dave (Simon Rex), skips town to wrangle the finer points of a sexual harassment case, leaving his wife and program host, Edna (Chloë Sevigny), to salvage whatever magic they can get their hands on: a scoop, a story, some obscure and possibly fashionable TikTok trend, etc. Yet as Edna, along with her motley of much younger creatives — macho gay Justin (Joe Apollonio), hapless fuckboy Jeff (Alex Wolff), and the Spanish-speaking Elena (Ulman) — settles into the swing of things, their sleepy town awakens to the bristling minutiae of happenings and little absurdities, occurring both within the family hotel they lodge in and beyond the arid dirt roads outside. For some reason, everybody’s horny and pent-up, which means that very little work gets done for the bulk of their experimental sojourn. If The Klezmer Project, Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann’s lightly fictionalized chronicle of the search for dead tradition, toyed with absurdity through its layered narratives, Magic Farm tears away their coherence by way of an absurdism left to bleed itself out.
The film’s whimsical structure, bookended by Vice-styled cuts and a zany reworking of Millennial mumblecore, speaks to a sensibility beyond the old cynical school of postmodernism, and its plea for authenticity comes across best in the crew’s interactions with some of the locals. In particular, as Elena builds a rapport with the occult-adjacent Popa (Valeria Lois) and Jeff goads her daughter Manchi (Camila del Campo) down the road of emotional vulnerability, Magic Farm almost turns its satire back on itself. The gringos have no self-awareness, are happy to coast on whatever culture that trickles down to them, and Ulman’s own enterprise courts serendipity in its loosely stitched vignettes. But the result is disappointingly thin; as much as the film cribs its aesthetics from the likes of Sebastián Silva and Eugene Kotlyarenko (one of its producers), it proves enervating for anybody not in the thick of its quirky inaction. A health crisis induced by crop pesticides would have been an obvious and socially conscious choice of documentary topic for Ulman’s characters, but she herself barely covers it. With no little irony, the biggest exposé in Magic Farm turns out to be its snake oil charm.
DIRECTOR: Amalia Ulman; CAST: Alex Wolff, Chloë Sevigny, Simon Rex, Joe Apollonio, Camila Del Campo; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: April 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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