By Robert Scucci
| Published
Most horror movies take place in the dead of night, where masked murderers, ghouls, demons, or other supernatural entities are free to terrorize their subjects by hiding in the darkness and going for the kill when the opportunity presents itself. 2018’s The Farm takes a different approach that’s at first disarming, but becomes increasingly unsettling because the entire movie takes place during regular business hours on a sprawling factory farm where humans are slaughtered like livestock and ground into meat.
I had one recurring thought the entire time I was watching The Farm, and I’m still thinking about it: just a couple towns away from the factory farm where countless human beings are being artificially inseminated, milked, slain, and served, people are probably running errands, getting tax statements notarized at the bank, or picking their kids up from school, completely unaware of the fact that something so horrific is happening in, or near, their community.
You Have To Muscle Through The First Act
I’ll admit that The Farm takes a little bit of time to get going, and during its first act I really didn’t develop a connection with its protagonists, Nora (Nora Yessayan) and Alec (Alec Gaylord). Lost on their drive through a rural area, Nora constantly nags Alec, unprompted, and Alec’s stubborn defensiveness makes them both come off as patently unlikeable people who make you wonder why they’re even a couple in the first place. It’s when they finally get abducted and separated in The Farm’s second act that things really get cooking (literally and figuratively).
Framed as your typical movie about a couple getting lost and staying the night at a random cabin to get some sleep, The Farm quickly pivots to its dread inducing second and third acts when both Nora and Alec wake up in cages on a massive factory farm run by a bunch of cannibals wearing animal masks who treat humans like animals ready for slaughter.
Help Isn’t Coming
Similar to 2006’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, The Farm’s setup and premise let the viewer know that help probably isn’t coming.
In the case of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel reboot, you know nobody’s getting out alive because it takes place long before Leatherface and his family get apprehended, so it wouldn’t make sense for anybody to escape and track down help when you consider the timeline of events across the entire franchise.
The Farm takes a different approach but generates the same feeling of dread because the compound where Nora and Alec are held captive is absolutely massive, covering what appears to be several hundred acres. While there’s a lingering hope that Nora and Alec can find the keys to a tractor, or find weapons on-site to defend themselves while plotting a daring escape, you go into The Farm knowing that they’ll have a fair amount of difficulty finding the correct way back to civilization. But at the same time, The Farm is disarming in a way that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning isn’t because its daytime setting gives you as a viewer a false sense of security.
At least in my mind, most of the horrific events that take place in The Farm caught me off guard because I’ve been conditioned to think that bad things don’t happen in horror movies until after dusk.
The Farm doesn’t quite stick the landing because it has an environmental message that simultaneously seems like an intended through line and an afterthought. Most slaughter sequences are jarring to look at because regular people are being treated with a level of brutality that’s considered acceptable when it’s done to animals on actual, real-life factory farms. While I appreciate not being preached to in such a heavy-handed way, The Farm could have benefitted from leaning into this theme a little more instead of simply following a stereotypical survival horror storyline that Nora and Alec find themselves in.
I won’t try to convince you that The Farm is a great horror movie, but it does an excellent job proving the concept that you don’t need bumps in the night to generate good scares, and I admire writer/director Hans Stjernsward’s willingness to create a reality where neighboring communities are either ignorant to the crimes against humanity that are taking place in their backyard, or are fully aware and simply don’t care.
Streaming on Tubi for free, The Farm is worth your patience if you can get past its initial setup. But if you’re thinking about tapping out before things truly heat up, I wouldn’t blame you either.
