Writer-director Martin McDonagh returns with Wild Horse Nine, the fifth film of his rightly celebrated career. Once again, you can expect a rush of nominations and awards, following on from 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (seven Oscar nods, two wins) and 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin (nine Oscar nominations). Like both, Wild Horse Nine premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival, which is something of McDonagh’s lucky charm.
Not that he needs any good fortune with this latest effort, which springs from an expertly crafted screenplay, one that recalls the odd couple set-up of McDonagh’s debut In Bruges. While that featured Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell as two bickering hitmen on a job in the titular “fairytale” town, here we have Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich, as two CIA operatives. And, guess what? They bicker. A lot.
Fear not, though; McDonagh is far from spinning his wheels, delivering a poignant, powerful film that skilfully blends the personal and the political. The year is 1973, and Rockwell’s Lee and Malkovich’s Chris are in Santiago, Chile. “We came down here to destabilise your democracy,” the outlandish veteran Chris tells two disbelieving girls at the airport, said in such a jokey way they can’t take him seriously. But underneath the dark humour lies the bleak truth.
As history tells us, in the film the country’s ruler Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist president, will soon be overthrown in a military coup. Clearly, Chris and Lee are in town to help engineer this horror, although McDonagh has other plans for these two. When we meet them, they’re heading to the remote Chilean territory that is Easter Island, the Polynesian isle boasting the magical stone heads, carvings every bit as mysterious as Stonehenge.
The reason for the trip will become clear, even with Lee under instruction from his boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) to keep watch over the volatile Chris. “You get old… you start to question shit,” says this proverbial loose canon, who is planning to write an explosive memoir. It’s a tome that’s of great concern to MJ – not least because Chris was part of the Bay of Pigs debacle and, even more intriguingly, was present in Dallas in November 1963, when JFK was shot.
Already exasperated with his partner, Lee also has his own issues back home, dealing with his boozy, cynical wife Marge (Parker Posey), the mother of his two kids (when he asks how they are, she tosses off “Who cares?” – one of many brilliantly delivered lines). With Chris and Lee tramping around Easter Island like your typical bullish American tourists, a remote locale beautifully captured by DoP Ben Davis, it’s a delicious playground for McDonagh to unfold this blackly comic drama.
While some choices lean towards absurdism a little too much (MJ has a heroin addiction, causing him to fall asleep at inopportune moments), Wild Horse Nine scores thanks to the fractious chemistry between the two leads. Rockwell, who won an Oscar for his work in Three Billboards…, is excellent, but Malkovich really deserves the plaudits. Surely, a much-overdue Oscar ought to be winging its way to him at the end of the upcoming awards season.
With Buscemi on wily form, Posey hilariously acerbic and even a touching cameo from Tom Waits, it’s a startling comic cauldron. Yet lurking underneath is the unsettling sense that the CIA is riding roughshod over Latin America, callously pulling political strings. Like the flip side of Paul Thomas Anderson’s tale of left-leaning revolutionaries, One Battle After Another, McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine hints, brutally, at unchecked American imperialism. An untameable beast of a movie.
Wild Horse Nine releases in UK cinemas on 5 November.
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