Magic Farm review - numpties from the Nineties

There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater” when she was growing up in the 1990s. The phrase brings the half-forgotten world of Generation X back to us from the mists of time, with its slackers and Douglas Coupland books and mumbling evasions.

The New York-based Ulman says she wanted to explore this Gen X world in her second feature, Magic Farm – but rather confusingly she sets it in the present amid the X-ers’ successors, the Millennials. From her angle, there seems scarce difference between the two cohorts. On the strength of this movie, the dress-down, think-down attitudes of the young have altered not a lot from 1995 to 2025.

The amenable comedy is a rather formless study of the ultra-gormless, in this case four members of a video crew making a Vice TV-esque lifestyle show for some cable network or other (which already feels a bit dated, as indeed do Millennials themselves about now). They’ve decamped from Manhattan to the middle of nowhere in Argentina to follow up a show on “Bolivian teen exorcists” with one on a cra-zee musician who prances about in rabbit ears.

But, as if in an episode of Arrested Development, they’ve muddled up place names and gone to the wrong San Cristóbal. (It turns out there are dozens of them.) So they set about ginning up their own fake “trend” for the camera, splashing some cash to get the obliging locals to jump and jive with fluorescent gift ribbons on their heads.

The Gen X icon Chloë Sevigny plays the exasperated presenter of the dopey doc, with Alex Wolff as a producer with a Bill Clinton-like zipper problem and Ulman herself as a production junior. All have various issues they seem too bored to take seriously. The irony is there’s a major story right under their turned-up noses – an agri-business spraying crops with chemicals that cripple people. None of the American media numpties think this might have any relevance to their profession. They’re too busy being bamboozled by the fact that everyone round here speaks Spanish. 

Ulman’s feature has the laid-back, jazzy air of American indie pics all the way back to Cassavetes. It’s a style that naturally got a particular kick in the slackery 1990s with the emergence of Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson and the like. The knack of this kind of filmmaking, of course, is to smuggle story discipline and character development inside a throwaway wrapping. (A TV show that Gen Xers gathered round, Seinfeld, was supposedly about “nothing”, but in fact had plotting that was as tightly curled as a French horn.)

Magic Farm, though, has too much of a purely aimless, centrifugal feel, as if it’s one long trailer in search of a movie. People wander in and out to express random emotions that seem disconnected from clear motivation or story point. But even if you have characters that fail to launch, the film itself has to. And the issue of the dangerous herbicide hangs over them all as a curt indictment rather than a motor. The film’s loose-limbed look is combined with goofy music and a festive nursery colour-scheme that evokes Curb Your Enthusiasm meeting a Pee-wee Herman movie.

Still, writer-director Ulman has a good ear for the terms and memes of the smushed-together eras she’s covering. “Do you have tequila or a Xanax?” someone asks – or, failing that, a vape-charger? Somebody else is hailed for their prowess as “an unbelievable knitter”. It’s just a bit of a pity that the word “glyphosate”, referring to the deadly fertiliser, finds no place in these characters’ heedless hipster lexicon.

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