Magic Farm, Argentine-Spanish filmmaker Amalia Ulman's second feature after 2021’s El Planeta, is a vivid, wacky, convincingly performed but slightly underbaked culture-clash comedy.
A team of obnoxious, self-absorbed American filmmakers, who make attention-grabbing, off-kilter online videos, head off to a rural town in Argentina to interview a bunny ear-wearing musician who has gone viral.
The only thing is, due to poor communication and lazy research, they’ve landed in the wrong South American country.
Desperate to save their reputations and make good on the considerable expense of hustling this quintet of content creators to such a remote location, they set about grilling the locals about potential stories to shoot, all the while ignorantly ignoring the enormous health crisis story under their noses.
The team is headed up by jaded presenter Edna (Chloë Sevigny) and her slimy producer-husband Dave (Simon Rex), who soon hurriedly returns to New York to deal with an icky legal issue.
Edna is left to pick up the pieces alongside her three young crew members - the inept, whiny producer Jeff (Alex Wolff), impressively coiffed and sweet sound guy Justin (Joe Apollonio) and steadfast cameraperson Elena, played by Ulman herself, who is both the only Spanish-speaking member of the group and the only one who seems to have her head on her shoulders.
They team up with the kindly hostel manager (Guillermo Jacubowicz), connected local woman Popa (Valeria Lois) and her beautiful, chronically online adult daughter Manchi (Camila del Campo) to try and concoct a story.
While Magic Farm is breezily watchable, aided by the pleasingly lurid cinematography, perfectly pitched performances and occasional zingy one-liners, there's a sense that we never get to scratch the surface of any of the characters.
In a somewhat underwritten role, Sevigny brings a stoic resignedness to Edna, Wolff is transformed as a hot-mess ladies man and Apollonio and Jacubowicz bring a tenderness to their sweet and unexpected bond.
Some genuine moments poke through the absurdist, deadpan humour, and the intermittent gimmicky camerawork gives the proceedings an enjoyably trippy feel, there’s a sense Magic Farm never quite fulfills its considerable potential.
