Wild Horse Nine

Mostly unfolding on the lonely Pacific outpost of Easter Island, Wild Horse Nine is the latest darkly absurd comedy thriller from London-born Irish playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh. Consistently great, occasionally sublime, it bounces along on big laughs and knockout performances, most notably from John Malkovich in a rare return to peak form.

Building on a prize-winning run of critical and commercially acclaimed work including In Bruges (2008), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), McDonagh’s fifth feature world premieres in Venice this week, kicking off a busy run of festivals including Telluride, Toronto, Zurich and London. Wild Horse Nine should do brisk business when Searchlight roll out worldwide theatrical release in November, with awards season buzz very likely.

Wild Horse Nine takes place in Chile in 1973, shortly before the CIA-backed coup which ousted democratically elected left-wing president Salvador Allende and installed murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet. Long-serving CIA agent Charles (Malkovich) is a hard-bitten veteran of multiple shady operations in the Congo, Indonesia, Cuba and other Cold War hot spots. McDonagh strongly hints he was also complicit in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But now Charles is dying of cancer, and as a devout Catholic, he feels compelled to confess his sins in a tell-all memoir before his final curtain falls. He is becoming a loose-cannon liability for his boss, bureau chief MJ, played with gloriously sleazy relish by Steve Buscemi.

Charles has a younger protege, fellow CIA gunman Lee (McDonagh regular Sam Rockwell), his only real friend in the world. The pair bicker like an old married couple, but they are also close enough to share their deepest secrets and take holidays together. Their latest destination is Easter Island, aka Rapa Nui, one of Chile’s most remote maritime territories.

Officially they are there to see the island’s famous landmarks, the moai carved heads. But with mortality looming, Charles has an ulterior motive, aiming to end his life with a little help from Lee. Complicating matters further, he recklessly shares the clandestine Pinochet coup plans with a pair of young women tourists (Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas). Meanwhile, double agents and killers gather in the shadows. Before long a low-key assisted suicide scheme escalates into a frantic, plot-twisting bloodbath.

If some of these narrative details sound familiar, McDonagh covered strikingly similar terrain in his previous films, notably In Bruges, which also featured two bickering hit men hiding away in a sleepy tourist town, ruminating on past crimes as they await their bloody destiny. Both screenplays even have running jokes about dwarves, which appear to be a recurring obsession for the writer-director. In fairness, McDonagh is not hiding the parallels, describing Wild Horse Nine in press interviews as a cross between In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin. There are also distant echoes here of the Coen brothers comedy Burn After Reading (2008), which starred Malkovich as a disgruntled CIA whistleblower.

McDonagh’s signature skill is sharp-witted two-hander dialogue, and Wild Horse Nine is gratifyingly rich in killer lines. An extended riff on the links between democracy, homosexuality and high-quality cheese already feels like a classic. Also great fun are anguished debates about dinosaurs turning up in the afterlife, an infidelity subplot involving circus clowns, and a boastful body count contest between the two CIA gunman: “I’ve killed people in countries you can’t even spell,” Chris tells Lee at one point.

Later in the drama, when McDonagh adopts a more serious register, he is less persuasive. Scenes in which Chris and Lee brood guiltily over their CIA assassination work mostly fizzle out without any clear moral insights. A cut-away cameo featuring Tom Waits as Chris’ long-estranged brother, holed up in a cabin overlooking Monument Valley, aims for elegiac lyricism but feels too much like a superfluous casting stunt framed by some majestic Wild West scenery. The heavy-handed dead horse motif that runs throughout the story is so bluntly symbolic it almost looks like self-parody. As in Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh’s stabs at philosophical depth can feel a little hollow.

That said, Wild Horse Nine mostly hits the target as a high-energy, fast-talking, guns-blazing farce. The main acting honours belong to Malkovich, who gives a towering autumnal performance that swings between poignant and puckish, defeated and defiant, whispery vagueness and scalpel-sharp wit. He appears to be channelling all the stages of grief at once, and plenty more besides. The emotional heartbeat of the story, this operatic star turn is a pleasing reminder just how magnetic a screen presence Malkovich used to be before all those scenery-chewing roles in schlocky genre thrillers.

Rockwell and Buscemi are reliably great too, but they are moons orbiting around Planet Malkovich. The 72-year-old star seems sure to win awards for this magisterial performance, maybe even his first Oscar after multiple near-miss nominations. Meanwhile a handful of female cast members, notably Di Girolamo and Parker Posey, do their best with underwritten sideshow subplots that deserve a little more screen time.

In visual terms, the verdant rolling landscapes of Easter Island/Rapa Nui are a gift to McDonagh’s long-time cinematographer Ben Davis, who fills Wild Horse Nine with lustrous widescreen vistas, elegantly punctuated by grainy Super 8 footage notionally shot by Lee’s home movie camera. Music is also smartly deployed, with vintage tracks by Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell and more serving not just as period detail but also informing some of the wry dialogue. A concert scene featuring Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer later tortured and murdered by the Pinochet regime, is a gracious touch, paying bittersweet homage to the thousands of artists and activists killed following the coup.

Director, screenwriter: Martin McDonagh
Cast: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Mariana Di Girolamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits, Parker Posey
Cinematographer: Ben Davis
Editing: Mikkel E. G. Nielsen
Production designer: Denis Schnegg
Music: Carter Burwell
Producers: Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Martin McDonagh, Anita Overland
Production company: Blueprint Pictures (UK)
Venue: Venice Film festival (Competition)
In English
118 minutes