Do You Have Tequila, and/or Xanax?

A quick appreciation of Amalia Ulman's Magic Farm, my favorite movie of the year so far

Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm: what can I say? Obviously something—more than a Letterboxd post, which would instrumentalize even sincerity to a nasty bit of clout chasing, less than an essay. Certainly less than an essay. Earlier this week, I realized that I’d accidentally started reading an essay and shuddered. Magic Farm is a totally successful movie, which means it resists the sort of meandering long-read that puts it in conversation with an Edward Hopper painting and tends to be the best thing someone’s read all year. Then—a blog post.

First some loose ends: missed two weeks of blogging after committing to a sort of weekly output. It’s fine, you’re not paying me, I wouldn’t want you to, sometimes it’s nice being lazy. Since last intruding upon your inbox I had the extremely good fortune of getting to sit down with billy woods at Passion of the Weiss, which has been a dream of mine for quite some time. I guess it’s something of a joke, every eager writer excitedly sitting down with woods, but I was moved by how gracious he was with someone who basically had no idea what he was doing. My favorite aspect of the conversation, which only slightly conveys in the copy, was how frequently I offered an interpretation of one of his lyrics that was objectively, plainly wrong. He was cool about it. You can read the conversation, and my thoughts on his excellent new record, here; I’m happy with how it all turned out and hope you enjoy.

Now, Magic Farm, the sophomore effort from the now 2/2 Amalia Ulman. I loved this movie—that’s it, I loved this movie. Should it work? You read the promotional plot summary and tell me. There are countless versions of the film hinted at within it that would, most likely, not have worked. You can extrapolate, from interviews Ulman has given (including this great interview with my friend Jack), that these inferior iterations of the film may actually have been her entryway into it. High-level overview: a sort of Vice-but-for-Tik-Tok ‘creative agency’ fly down to a small Argentinian village in search of a local musician who performs wearing bunny ears, only to learn that the village he’s from (San Cristobal, if memory serves) is as generic a name in South America as Smallville in the Unites States. The operation consists of Chloe Sevigny, playing a version of herself as clouted elderstateswoman/mother figure, Simon Rex as a tonally perfect Dov Charney allegations type, Ulman as reluctant interpreter between moron and small-towner, Alex Wolff as a remarkable send-up of a softboi multihyphenate (the film’s best gag includes Wolff’s business card, which requires three lines of text to list all the cities from which his creative operation operates), and Joe Apollonio in a role that transforms in real time from the film’s moronic punching bag into its emotional core. That was a lot—the actors are great, and the roles are largely remarkably written. The bit, basically, is that these solipsistic hipsters decide to fabricate a trend that compels apocalyptic Christians to dance to saccharine cumbia while wearing gift bows on their heads, because they are “gifts from God;” as the attempt to build out this fake story deepens, the characters find themselves further called into the internal life of San Cristobal. Throughout the film, the crew in their blinkered pursuit of a fake trend miss countless genuinely compelling stories, most of all the town’s routine dousing in glysophates by agribusiness jets, plumes of herbicides demonstrates to cause birth defects and poisoning the town. At one point, the Americans themselves are sprayed; the potential complications to Ulman’s character’s unborn fetus are the only memory of the practice that the group bring back with them to the States.

The above-linked interview seems to suggest that Ulman first started thinking up this film upon learning that her real-life Argentian grandmother went blind due to glysophate exposure. Downtown Erin Brokovich might have landed with a thud; a film about how the downtown kids are too busy looking at their phones to see the Brokovich underneath their noses succeeds completely. Even still, praising the movie can make it seem didactic. It’s not—it’s just funny, contained, and ambitiously directed. If the last decade of hacky millennial television was undone by terminally Twitter-brained writers’ rooms, Magic Farm is somehow a film enhanced by its being Instagram-poisoned. Ulman knows what she’s doing, and she’s good at it. The idea of Alex Wolff in a huge shirt playing some cautionary fuckboy tale is enough to make you rip your eyes out; Wolff analogizing the process by which women synchronize their menstrual cycles to “when you put fruit together and they rot faster” is another thing entirely. At the risk of lumping together former Ion Pack guests—life is about more than this, surely—Ulman succeeds in conveying generational archetypes in a way that feels vivid and engaging rather than rote because, unlike an Honor Levy, she is able to do more than simply point out the way in which It Do Be Like That. Magic Farm transcends the sort of “recognize this guy? how about her?” sleepwalking that so much art made by those in my generational cohort falls into—what we might call starter pack cinema. Here, you recognize the characters, but then you’re asked to engage with them; better yet, they’re dropped into a random Argentinian village.

Ulman’s handle on her characters and world allows her to explore some rich thematic terrain. If in Dark Waters, Mark Ruffalo’s crusading environmental attorney is disciplined throughout his crusade for justice by corporate power and the coercive reality of unpaid bills, Magic Farm’s would-be journalists respond to a more diffuse, arguably subtler series of dictates. There’s a case to be made for Magic Farm as one of the first foundational texts of the clout-chaser, pivot-to-video era. You don’t go after DuPont because they employ everybody in town; you don’t report on multinational agribusiness poisoning Argentinian villages because that thumbnail just doesn’t fucking scale. Are any of the cancer-stricken locals alleviating the weight of their collective grief through ayahuasca? Now, that’s a story.

It’s a smart point that she doesn’t berate you with. Medium, message, right? Blunter yet: the whole “character goes looking for one thing and finds something else altogether” arc may no longer apply to a generation too busy scrolling their phones to look up and see the second thing in the first place. Do with that what you will—the film isn’t homework, and President Trump has issued a 100% tariff on ‘phone bad’ pieces after reading all of your Substacks.

Point being: it’s not often that New Orleans gets movies like this, ironically enough at the same venue that, two weeks prior, hosted an electric performance from ‘punk cumbia’ group Son Rompe Pera (merch line trucker hats: “Cumbia is the New Punk”). There’s something there about the continuity between a film that positions cumbia as a sort of music that the misplaced hipsters can’t quite get (“is there a way to make this sound less like a…duck?” asks a frustrated Apollonio) and a cumbia performance made specifically legible to hipsters…but that’s for another day. I’ll leave my praise for a restrained film restrained in kind.