Anti-fascist cinema: Magic Farm (2025)
Magic Farm (2025)
Written and directed by Amalia Ulman
People who bemoan the lack of imagination in movies nowadays are correct when it comes to the repetitive output of Hollywood. Revenge action thrillers rooted in male insecurity, animated musical film offerings to weary mothers and their elementary school-aged children, and horror genre tweaks, all on endless parade at the closest multiplex, are what they have in mind.
And it’s not their fault that people feel this way: Can most people go to Sundance or the Toronto Film Festival? No, they have jobs. Are they aware of great streaming alternatives like Mubi? No, they’re too exhausted by daily life in this crumbling capitalist nightmare to notice. The corporations want them to think that the same three or four types of film are all that exist, because that’s the most efficient way of getting money from them.
Fortunately, platforms like Mubi do exist. While I have no idea how it works financially, somehow the company is able not only to stream amazing movies like “The Substance,” “The Delinquents,” and “The Girl with the Needle,” but to have a hand in producing and releasing them too. Thus we have “Magic Farm,” a candy-colored satire of Americans, internet-first journalism, and yes, capitalism.
In this dark comedy, a small film crew goes to Latin America to shoot another in a series of culture/newsy/documentary shorts, sort of like Vice News. The overarching theme of their series is unclear — music? travel? the exotic? — but in any case, it’s obviously not serious.
The videos are hosted by Edna (Chloë Sevigny), apparently a famous but now somehat washed-up figure in the entertainment industry. She looks down on what they’re doing, and makes almost no effort whatsoever to facilitate the making of the finished product. You can see her thinking “I’m only the talent, I’m not going to tell the crew what to do.” This sidelines the character to a significant degree; viewers who go to the film expecting it to be a Chloë Sevigny movie may be disappointed she’s not the main focus.
The crew is a collection of young, pretty men and one woman, who are all almost hopelessly incompetent, starting with the first big mistake they make. They’re ostensibly out to investigate a band that performs wearing bunny ears, and all they have is one bit of information: the band is from a town called San Cristobal, and something about a doomsday cult. (This could be the premise of a horror scenario, but this is a comedy. On the other hand…)
They arrive in the rural town of San Cristobal, Argentina. No one there knows anything about any musicians who wear bunny ears. Eventually the Americans are gently informed that a town called San Cristobal exists in practically every Latin American country; perhaps they were looking for one of the others?
But rather than turn around and find the right town in the right country, the crew stays; the production doesn’t have enough budget to relocate them. So, ordered to bring back footage of something that can be slapped into an episode, they decide they may as well just make something up.
The plot doesn’t primarily follow the crew’s efforts to develop this fraud, but pays closer attention to relationships between the Americans, and between them and the locals. The sound man, Justin (Joe Apollonio) is a gay man who develops a surprisingly sweet flirtation with the fleshy desk clerk at the hotel where they’re staying. The clerk (Guillermo Jacubowicz), or “receptionist” as the Americans refer to him, is kind, diplomatic, and apparently very excited that another gay person has come to his town and seems nice. That’s about as profound as their relationship gets; there’s no climactic kiss or anything, but you can see in the eyes of both characters a simultaneous attraction to the other and surprise that it’s happening. It’s simply a very sweet aspect to this movie, one of the only sheerly positive aspects of the story.
By contrast, Jeff (Alex Wolff), the team’s incompetent producer, divides his time between oversensitive reactions to what someone else has just said to him, and an attempt to seduce a young local woman, Manchi; their relationship is anything but sweetly carried out or rendered. The whole gestalt of the movie is wrapped up in the character of Jeff. “Magic Farm” is a sendup of Americans abroad, mercilessly depicting their naïveté, ignorance, unexamined privilege, inability to see things from any point of view than their own, and raging neuroses; Jeff embodies all of these aspects.
As for Manchi, played by Uruguayan actress and model, Camila del Campo, she’s a very pretty and typical teenaged wannabe TikTok star who has to climb a tree to get a phone signal strong enough to upload a clip. In addition to the direct, critical attitude that typifies all teenagers, Manchi sports a discomfiting facial blemish; in fact, when she removes her top, we can see patchy discolorations in many places on her body. (In fact, her rather jarring facial discoloration — a large red patch that in places darkens to an unhealthy-appearing blackness — is not makeup but del Campo’s real face.)
These apparent disfigurations draw viewers’ attention to the fact that undergirds the whole movie: the town is being poisoned by dioxins contained in a pesticide being regularly sprayed on their crops. Children have birth defects, young people die, and everyone avoids drinking tap water.
But the villagers aren’t enraged — or are perhaps in a post-rage state. They don’t even talk about this calamity, seeming to accept it as their fate. No one suggests that the Americans should devote their skills, their expensive video equipment, and their platform to documenting this tragedy, and the Americans never even notice it. The prime irony of the movie is not that Americans are ill-behaved colonizers but that they miss the story that has dropped into their laps, instead continuing to pursue the trivial “trend” story they set out to capture.
For the locals, the satire is much gentler, depicting them respectfully. The writer-director, Amalia Ulman, is an Argentina-born Spanish filmmaker who is equally comfortable in both worlds, the rural South American town and the attention economy of the internet. She delights in the lives of the Argentinian characters and their foibles; yet they can’t be viewed as wholesome due to the poison in their bodies. The primary question the film asks is to what extent can the feverish, trivial FOMO culture represented by the Americans ( which Manchi wishes to be part of) also be viewed as poison.
But there’s another framing that’s easy to miss. The film begins with the image of a late-middle-aged woman — like many of the performers who play locals, the actress is uncredited on the film’s IMDB page — riding a motorbike into town, entering her office at a local evangelical church, and taking a phone call confirming the imminent arrival of the American video crew. Though she’s their only contact, she then leaves town until the film’s penultimate scene, in which she takes the microphone at a party attended by both the townspeople and the video crew and begins delivering an apocalyptic vision of the townspeople being cleansed of their illnesses by the love of Jesus.
A viewer might see this moment as just one more surreal ocurrence in the movie’s series of weird images, not the least of which is the blemish disfiguring Manchi’s face. But if you’ve been paying attention, one of the Americans mentions at the beginning of the film that the town contains some kind of doomsday cult. I think Ulman is suggesting that such an apocalyptic vision is perfectly understandable, even normative, in a town being crushed by late-stage capitalism that sees these people as merely collateral damage to the profits to be made by corporate agriculture. If your whole town is being decimated by a world-encompassing force, whether satanic or economic (and who’s to say that the devil wouldn’t use a real-world institution like hedge-fund agribusiness to drive people to despair?), the apocalypse doesn’t look so bad.
“Magic Farm” is in theaters now, but will soon be available for streaming on Mubi.