Image: Searchlight Pictures.

Author’s Note: When I mentioned Wild Horse Nine to a friend, he said that he’d heard that this film is best without knowing anything about it. This review contains no spoilers to the events or plot points of the film; however there is character and theme discussion which may reveal more than some readers are comfortable knowing. As Wild Horse Nine shows, a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.

Everyone loves Batman. He’s among the most well known and well loved characters in all of fiction. His comics are the best selling every month with the recent “Absolute Batman” being also among the most critically acclaimed. His movies, if not billionaire-dollar blockbusters, at least always make a sizable profit. He’s the one comic book character whose adaptations, be they animated or live-action, are regularly considered as serious art. He’s the favorite superhero even among people who hate superheroes. Everyone loves Batman.

Yet, there are several ways in which Batman is a terrible character. In our real world, it’s highly likely that characters like Batman, Superman, and even Ironman, have conditioned entire generations toward authoritarianism by teaching them that the world’s problems can only be fixed by some lone, all-powerful savior figure. A man born to wealthy parents using his family’s billions, along with his natural athleticism and intelligence, to beat up people who weren’t born with the same inheritance is antithetical to the supposed foundations of Western society. He’s a volatile, unstable individual who has taught millions of people that the proper way to treat childhood trauma is through violence.

In fictional Gotham, the city he claims to protect, his presence triggered an arms race which has forced criminals to become more dangerous in order to combat him. “Absolute Batman” furthers the idea that a bigger, more dangerous “hero” necessitates a bigger, more dangerous villain, leaving the average citizens of Gotham with ever bigger, more dangerous threats. This escalation would even persist without Batman, leaving no way for Gotham to reclaim its previous form after Batman altered it. What’s more, the stories in which Batman “wins” often depict a world where every inch of space, every interaction, is watched and recorded. A world where fear is constant and freedom is decided by one man whose severe mental health issues have calcified through age, power, and a lack of consequence.

Now, you might be wondering, what does Batman have to do with Wild Horse Nine? We’ll get there.

‘Wild Horse Nine’ is another entry in Martin McDonagh’s two guys talking series.
Image: Searchlight Pictures.

Although most known for his film work, writer-director Martin McDonagh started his career as a playwrite. In fact, his previous film, 2022’s mesmerizing The Banshees of Inisherin, started as the unpublished and unproduced stage play The Banshee of Inisheer, the third in his Aran Island Trilogy. McDonagh’s theater roots are easy to see in the rapid fire banter portrayed between characters in his previous films, most particularly Banshees and his feature debut In Bruges. At times, figures in McDonagh’s work are more established through their manner of speech and frequent use of creative profanity than through any amount of casual brutality. The bluntness with which his characters speak reflects their nihilistic outlook, thus preparing the viewer for when the inevitable violence begins.

At this point in his career, McDonagh has honed his dialog so precisely that a film like Wild Horse Nine is at its best when it the only action on screen is two people exchanging lines like they’re steps in a great verbal dance. Entire plots pivot on seemingly throw-away comedic asides. Casual, period-appropriate racism captures socio-political allegory. Even moments when characters choose not to speak often say more than a full expository monologue. While, when viewed alongside the previously mentioned predecessors, the overall trajectory of Wild Horse Nine becomes clear, there is so much delight in individual lines that each new conversation becomes a treat in itself. Beyond any structural or artistic achievements, McDonagh’s true gift is simply in two guys talking. It helps when those two guys (or gals, but McDonagh mostly writes guys) are as immensely talented as those in Wild Horse Nine.

‘Wild Horse Nine’ is at its best when Malkovich gets to be Malkovich, and Rockwell gets to react.
Image: Searchlight Pictures.

One way in which Wild Horse Nine differentiates itself from McDonagh’s previous two-guys-talking films is simply through John Malkovich’s performance. Malkovich’s naturally arrhythmic manner of speaking slows down much of the dialog. His detached, at times languid delivery adds a layer of hopelessness to McDonagh’s characteristically acerbic script. The lines don’t crackle. They cut. As veteran CIA agent Chris Carlisle, Malkovich speaks with the certainty of someone who knows exactly how world events will unfold because he’s the one who put in the creases. Having gone through life largely unaffected by the world around him, Chris is unfamiliar concept of being afraid, and the shock of this new sensation comes through in the casual recklessness Malkovich displays in his scenes with Lee (Sam Rockwell, more on him soon) and local students Monica and Alicia. Being at the point where his own career may be winding down, there’s likely a lot of Malkovich himself in the character of Chris as both men have spent much of their lives doing the necessary work of playing the villain. While Malkovich is obviously well known and well loved, he’s rarely if ever credited as the star, in the same way that the assassin is rarely as recognizable as the target.

Where Malkovich re-shapes every role he plays, Sam Rockwell’s greatest gift seems to be his ability to adapt his own considerable charisma into whatever form the role requires. In this case, Rockwell serves as Malkovich’s dramatic foil, there to present the clean, public-facing version of the often dirty and secretive truth. Like Lee, Rockwell knows that this moment isn’t his and allows Chris/Malkovich to step into the spotlight, while also contending with the mounting pressures demeaning that he simply cut the older man out of the picture. Their relationship, one built with equal parts necessity, affection, and tension, carries much of the film. Even when the film itself seems to lose momentum, the dynamic between the two characters and actors is more than enough to propel the narrative forward. It’s only fitting then that the supporting cast include Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey, with Buscemi bringing his own off-kilter talent and Posey playing into the general distaste within her voice and expressions. Yet Wild Horse Nine’s most magnificent piece of casting comes in the form of Tom Waits growling into an old telephone receiver.

There has never been a more, “Yup, that’s Tom Waits” image than this.
Image: Searchlight Pictures.

While Chris and Lee form the core of Wild Horse Nine’s narrative, its true heart lies in the uneasy and unwanted connection between Chris and Monica (Marianna di Girolamo Arteaga). In Monica, Chris finally comes to see the millions of victims his action have created around the world. The disbelieving and disgusted silence with which she initially regards him pierces his seeming invulnerability, making his pursuit of her less one of sexual conquest than of redemption. If she can see what is good and worthy in him, then perhaps he isn’t as empty and damned as he fears. The way he speaks with her, with its casual terror, becomes an act of penance. Although ever present through the film, Wild Horse Nine’s theme of regret is rarely more elegant than in Chris’s ride with Monica into the old quarries of Easter Island, or, as it is more accurately known, Rapa Nui.

Despite being set on one of the most isolated places in the world, Wild Horse Nine doesn’t exoticize its remote location. Instead, Rapa Nui serves as a microcosm of how Chris, Lee, and the United States in general have historically regarded the rest of the world. These aren’t places where people live. These are pieces in a game. Pieces that can be moved, collected, and traded. Chris’s immediate diminishment of the indigenous name of the island and its “big heads” demonstrates the attitude America has typically shown the rest of the world: you are whatever we say you are. Your borders are what we draw. Your leaders are who we decide. Your lives are ours. Although McDonagh often includes the location in the title of his films, the location is rarely more than a backdrop for the conversations and the themes explored by the narrative. They are literal background, often very beautiful ones. In Wild Horse Nine, the location is both essential and meaningless. Chris has spent his entire professional life moving from place to place doing things without any input or regard for the local population, so why should Rapa Nui be any different?

Despite the cynicism, there are some genuinely heartfelt moments in ‘Wild Horse Nine.’
Image: Searchlight Pictures.

By setting the film in Santiago, Chile, 1973, just before the US-backed coup d’état that installed a military dictatorship, McDonagh forces modern audiences to reflect on the actions America has taken around the world. In Chris, we see the callousness, the destruction, the death that our country has forced upon so many others. We see the dismissal, the casual racism, sexism, and homophobia so often used to justify these actions. The idea that we know better. That we’re the good guys. Or, at least, the necessary evil. That America is somehow the moral arbiter of the world. We see the way that we have historically laughed in the faces of people just trying to create a standard of living equal to our own.

Also in Chris, we see the emptiness, the sickness that decades of geo-political exploitation have generated within our own country. We see how our actions – regardless of their justification at the time – unfolded into the future in which we currently live. How US support in South America gave rise to dictatorships and drug cartels. How US intervention in the Middle East birthed Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban. How Watergate and the Kennedy Assassination eroded trust in our own government. How the current “don’t call it a war” in Iran will inevitably create generations of extremists that future right wingers will use to condemn and demonize an entire demographic. Is it any wonder then that millions of people will still support a “president” who led an insurrection against our own country? We unleashed a disease upon the world, and now we’re sad because the infection has spread to us.

‘Wild Horse Nine’ really shows how beautiful Rapa Nui is. Before the Americans get there.
Image: Searchlight Pictures.

Like Batman, American likes to think of itself as the hero (told you we’d get back to that). We like to think of ourselves as the force which keeps the world, and the people within it, safe, rather than the country that created the arms race, built the drug trade, and still supports the genocide in Gaza. We are the rich country beating up on poorer countries and calling it justice. And, like Batman, our “victory” is a society where every space, every interaction, is watched, recorded, and judged by an emotionally stunted billionaire whose severe mental health issues have calcified through age, power, and a lack of consequence.

We made our own villains, and no amount of regret will ever change that.

But, at least we can always find a pretty place, somewhere outside of the countries our greed has bombed, strip-mined, and drained dry, and wish we’d spent more time petting horses.

Rating: 4 / 5