Wild Horse Nine
Martin McDonagh (2026)
He started creative life as a playwright, but Martin McDonagh has developed into a director of cinema that looks good and moves fluently. Wild Horse Nine – his fifth feature, showing at the London Film Festival shortly before general release in British cinemas – is further proof of that. (As on three of the four previous features, Ben Davis is the cinematographer. Mikkel E G Nielsen is McDonagh’s film editor for the second time.) McDonagh remains a writer at heart, though, and his great facility for dialogue limits him as a filmmaker. His screen work majors in smart black-comedy writing that often boils down to show-off cynicism, though with an occasional dash of supposedly leavening human feeling. Wild Horse Nine is proof of this, too – more objectionable proof than either of McDonagh’s two preceding pictures, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). That’s largely because this time he’s dealing with serious political issues – but only pretending to be serious in dealing with them.
It’s 1973, shortly before the coup d’état in Chile that will overthrow Salvador Allende’s government, the first democratically elected Marxist administration in Latin American history. Two CIA men – grizzled veteran Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and his younger, though longstanding, partner Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) – travel from Santiago to Easter Island. The visit has apparently been planned as a short break for the pair, before they resume work as part of the CIA’s efforts to destabilise the Allende regime and facilitate its military overthrow and replacement by the junta led by Augusto Pinochet. But Lee’s reports back to base rattle CIA bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi). At Santiago airport, Chris gets into conversation with two Chilean college students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), and tells them what’s scheduled to happen in their country on 11 September (that really was the date of the coup d’état). MJ also learns, to his horror, that Chris has decided to write his memoirs. Lee is instructed by his boss to kill the man who was once his mentor, is now an intolerably loose cannon.
MJ doesn’t know that Lee is already expecting to end Chris’s life in the home of the great Moai statues – at Chris’s request. The older man is terminally ill with cancer, addicted to morphine and showing increasing signs of dementia, though he still knows what he intends to put in the story of his CIA career. At the airport, Monica and Alicia were also en route to Easter Island; Chris is determined to keep talking to them there, though what he says to the students repeatedly causes offence. One of these two young women turns out to be not what she seems: unbeknown to Monica, Alicia is an undercover CIA operative. When MJ gets anxious enough to fly over to sort things out, it’s Alicia who meets his plane. Not much screen time later, both he and she (and other agents who converge on Easter Island) will have died violently. Chris is Wild Horse Nine’s last fatality yet his death – on a hillside, where horses that the film’s named for graze – is rather more peaceful. Never mind that Chris has meanwhile learned about Lee’s dilemma, which translates into an insoluble conundrum for Chris. When Lee pulls the trigger, Chris won’t know – as he tells his companion – if Lee has respected Chris’s wishes or complied with CIA orders. This tension fuels the climax to Wild Horse Nine.
It’s no surprise that actors like working with a filmmaker who gives them dramatic character arcs, along with juicy lines, and McDonagh is once more rewarded with strong performances from his main players. By comparison with his flamboyant role in Three Billboards, it’s quite slim pickings here for Sam Rockwell, and Lee’s phone calls home to his feckless wife (Parker Posey) seem like filler, but Rockwell does a good job, especially in conveying Lee’s mixture of puzzlement and fellow feeling with Chris, whom Lee doesn’t fully understand. Wild Horse Nine is John Malkovich’s film, though. Malkovich is a past master of bone-dry delivery. If he did no more than speak Chris’s many withering one-liners, it would be enough to keep many audience members happy, but he does a good deal more than that with the character. Confessing his CIA sins, phoning his estranged brother (Tom Waits), not committing suicide – these all matter to Catholic Chris: Malkovich portrays someone scared of losing his mind, of dying and perhaps of what might follow death. He also ingeniously suggests a man whose increasing cynicism about his life’s work has mutated into a kind of grief.
That John Malkovich can’t go even further is because Martin McDonagh hasn’t the imaginative sympathy to explore whether Chris – or Lee, let alone Steve Buscemi’s MJ (who proves to be the junkie that Chris keeps saying he is) – might have joined the CIA for what once seemed to them principled motives. In contrast to Malkovich’s acting, McDonagh’s direction is transparent. It’s right enough to regret the Nixon administration’s role in the Chilean military coup, the ousting of Allende, the horrors of the Pinochet regime – but it’s also politically correct to do so. The same goes for the 1961 arrest and murder of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of what had been the Belgian Congo (and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), by Katangan separatists in cahoots with Belgian mercenaries and the CIA. At the start of Wild Horse Nine, McDonagh inserts newsreel footage of events in Chile in 1973. Soon after that, Chris imparts to a tape-recorder his career highlights, including the Lumumba assassination. McDonagh includes news film of that too, and for the same reason. He wants to make clear that what happened to Allende and Lumumba is no laughing matter. It’s different with the 1963 Kennedy assassination, in which Chris also claims involvement. McDonagh knows that the proliferating conspiracy theories, the grassy knoll etc, have made the killing of JFK political mythology as much as political history. Plenty of people over the years have mined the mythology for comedy and McDonagh now joins their number, as Chris threatens to spill the beans about who really was responsible for the assassination. The audience laps this up. McDonagh doesn’t include newsreel from Dallas.
This is only the third McDonagh feature I’ve seen, but it echoes the other two in important ways. A pair of men who work together: one short-fused, the other trying to control a situation; one terminally ill, one looking for atonement. Those two things, combined in the Malkovich character, were split between Woody Harrelson and Rockwell in Three Billboards. An established friendship suddenly in peril, like Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s in The Banshees of Inisherin. McDonagh certainly majors in male characters rather than female. (The plot synopses and cast lists for his earlier films, In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), neither of which I’ve seen, speak for themselves.) He seems to think men, although dependably worse than women, are also more interesting. Ingmar Bergman often gave that impression, too. A difference is that Bergman, in elaborating this view, wrote many good roles for women (roles played by a group of superlative actresses, as they were called in those days). Kerry Condon’s character, the sanest and most likeable person in Banshees, disappeared from the film halfway through. Mariana di Girolamo’s Monica is her nearest equivalent in Wild Horse Nine; Monica stays the course, but this is still a relatively skinny role. The major exception to all this, of course, is the heroine of Three Billboards, though you could argue that even Mildred Hayes isn’t, on paper, a fully developed individual woman but, rather, a fusion of female archetype (the mother) and Hollywood western male archetype (the rightful avenger). It’s just fortunate for McDonagh that Mildred was incarnated, and thoroughly humanised, by Frances McDormand.
Also as before, McDonagh occasionally can’t resist including little flourishes that he wants to include, even when they don’t really make sense. It’s Chris rather than Lee who says outrageous things in social situations: Lee’s furious outburst at a smug English couple in the restaurant of the place where he and Chris are staying, seems inexplicable beyond giving Sam Rockwell a bit more to do in the scene as a whole. There’s a change of plan for a while – for Chris and Lee to head to Venice for Chris’s execution – but it’s eventually abandoned: chatting on the hillside in the film’s finale, Chris mentions Venice for the last time, then admits ‘that ship has sailed’, before correcting ‘ship’ to ‘gondola’. Lee has the same thought at the same time and joins in; again, to give Rockwell a chance to do the same. Easter Island’s statues help greatly in conveying a sense that the protagonists find themselves in terra incognita, psychologically as well as actually. Carter Burwell has, as usual, written McDonagh an effective score. But when a filmmaker is pressing audience buttons, as Martin McDonagh is doing here, it’s always worse hearing the results of his success. It was probably a mistake to see this film in a packed Royal Festival Hall, where the knowing laughter was also a form of virtue signalling. If I’d waited a few weeks and watched it in a sparsely populated Curzon Richmond, I might not have felt so hostile to Wild Horse Nine. I doubt I’d have thought differently about it, though.
10 October 2026