Reviewed on January 23rd at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival – Premiere Section. 93 Mins
Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, Joe Apollonio, Camila Del Campo and Simon Rex
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Director: Amalia Ulman
In Irish Cinemas: 16th May 2025
Amalia Ulman’s “Magic Farm” skewers American media cluelessness with biting cross-cultural satire and a formal inventiveness that amplifies its deadpan comedy.
In her second feature film, Magic Farm, Argentine-born Spanish filmmaker Amalia Ulman delivers a sharply observed and deliberately awkward satire that exposes the ineptitude of a privileged American media crew while showcasing the ingenuity of the Argentine locals they seek to exploit. Steeped in discomfort and underpinned by a rich vein of cumbia music, the film aims at the self-absorbed impulses of Western content creators in search of exoticism, and it does so with bold stylistic choices and a sly, unyielding wit.
At the centre of this darkly comedic story is a ragtag team of Americans sent to rural Argentina by a Vice-like digital media outlet. Their mission? To document Super Carlitos, a whimsical local performer known for his signature bunny ears and colourful persona. But their ignorance is quickly exposed when it becomes apparent that they’ve landed in the wrong San Cristóbal—a familiar name across Latin America, yet somehow overlooked by the clueless producer Jeff, played with perfect obliviousness by Alex Wolff (Hereditary).
Ulman herself plays Elena, the crew’s cameraperson and translator, a character whose background—Argentine by birth but raised in Spain—mirrors the filmmaker’s own. This personal detail adds a meta-textual layer, reinforcing Elena’s liminal identity as someone inside and outside the cultural spaces she navigates. While the Americans fumble through their assignment, Elena hints at an awareness that never quite tips into intervention. She’s perceptive but reserved, involved but not overtly judgmental—positioned as a quiet observer in a swirling mess of cluelessness and cultural misreadings.
The rest of the crew is a study in exaggerated archetypes: Chloë Sevigny plays Edna, the self-important and perennially irritated host; Joe Apollonio is Justin, the gay sound technician nursing a crush on the sweet but indifferent inn receptionist (Guillermo Jacubowicz); and Simon Rex makes a brief but memorable appearance as Dave, Edna’s partner and a higher-up in the company hierarchy. Though often ridiculous, these characters are never cartoonish—they’re rendered with an unnerving realism that heightens the film’s satire.
After realising their documentary’s original premise has evaporated, Jeff pivots to fabricating a sensationalist story about a fictional cult, enlisting the help of locals Popa (Valeria Lois) and her daughter Manchi (Camila del Campo). The resulting interactions provide some of the film’s funniest and most uncomfortable moments. For example, Popa’s surreal claim of an affair with a French film star is delivered with such sincerity that it becomes both hilarious and strangely poignant.
But Magic Farm isn’t just about cringe-inducing comedy. Ulman uses the film to indict the American tendency to treat other cultures as raw material for spectacle. While the Americans obsess over building a faux-narrative, the real story—of toxic pesticide use and its devastating effects on the local community—goes entirely unnoticed by them, even as it’s made crystal clear to the audience. This blind spot becomes a powerful commentary on Western media practices’ superficial, extractive nature.
Visually, the film embraces a kind of controlled chaos. Ulman, alongside cinematographer Carlos Rigo Bellver and editor Arturo Sosa, constructs a cinematic language that is both anarchic and meticulously crafted. Cameras are mounted on animals, 360-degree lenses distort space, and transitions are seamlessly jarring. These formal experiments reinforce the disorientation of the foreign crew and the absurdity of their presence, while also providing moments of unexpected beauty and humour.
Ulman’s direction calls to mind the work of Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva—particularly Crystal Fairy and Rotting in the Sun—in how it dissects cross-cultural friction and Western ignorance with absurdity and acidic insight. That Ulman cast recognisable actors and placed them in a rural Argentine setting only heightens the surreal clash between image and context. There’s a strange, unforgettable poetry to the sight of Chloë Sevigny marching down a dusty road in designer clothes while electronic cumbia blasts in the background.
Throughout the film, Argentine characters are depicted not as quaint or exotic but as quietly competent, occasionally bemused by the outsiders’ antics. Manchi must climb a tree to get cell reception. Toilets must be flushed with buckets. A local shopkeeper doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of Justin’s naivety. These moments underscore the Americans’ reliance on conveniences they take for granted and their complete lack of adaptability. In contrast, the locals’ resourcefulness feels natural and dignified—a subtle, ongoing inversion of the power dynamic.
Elena, as a character, remains opaque in terms of allegiance. She never quite declares herself aligned with the American interlopers or the local Argentines. Her cultural duality leaves her floating somewhere between, and Ulman chooses not to resolve this ambiguity. A more traditional film might have used her as a moral compass or a vehicle for critique, but Ulman’s choice to keep Elena largely complicit forces the audience to engage more actively with the ethical grey zones the film explores. Still, the filmmaker’s perspective is clear: Magic Farm stands firmly against cultural exploitation, and Ulman delivers a scathing indictment of media colonialism through its irony-laced structure.
By the end, what lingers is less the absurdity of the Americans and more the subtle strength of those they overlooked. With Magic Farm, Ulman has created a film that is not only sharply funny but thematically urgent—a vibrant, formally inventive provocation that never underestimates its audience’s intelligence.
Overall: 6/10
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