‘Wild Horse Nine’ is One of the Year’s Best Films and John Malkovich Proves It
There’s exactly one Martin McDonagh film I’ve never seen, and it’s the one most people would name first. In Bruges keeps slipping down my list, which is a little embarrassing given how much I love his work, from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to The Banshees of Inisherin. I’ll get there eventually.
Going into Wild Horse Nine, I knew almost nothing beyond his name. I skipped the premise and didn’t even check who else was in front of or behind the camera. The only other things I picked up were that John Malkovich was supposedly delivering an awards-caliber performance and that every reaction I’d come across was glowing. Both were more hope than fact, though I felt fairly safe about Malkovich. Weak acting is rarely what ruins a movie for me, and the people praising him are people whose judgment I trust. Beyond that, I just knew what a McDonagh flick can be at its best: dialogue with teeth, laughs that can turn sour without warning, and characters who are hard to love and harder to dismiss.
[Warning: spoilers from Wild Horse Nine are below!]
An old spy with a story to tell
Weeks before the 1973 coup that will bring down Salvador Allende’s government, CIA bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi) sends two of his officers from Santiago to Easter Island, about as far from the capital as Chilean territory goes. Chris (Malkovich) is the veteran, a man with a long career behind him and not much time left ahead. Lee (Sam Rockwell) is the protégé he trained, his partner for longer than either would care to count. While Chris spends the trip recording his memoirs on a dictaphone and Lee fields calls from his wife, Marge (Parker Posey), the two circle their shared past and a few present-day conspiracies. Then Chris befriends a pair of rebellious college students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) among them, and a quiet assignment on a remote island starts looking a lot less quiet.
A darkly funny reckoning with mortality
I expected Malkovich to be excellent. I didn’t expect him to have another performance of this size left in him. It sits near the top of everything I’ve seen him do, and it lives up to every bit of the buzz. Chris is magnetic, and so much of that comes from Malkovich refusing to let any single trait settle. He carries pride and shame in the same breath. He looks worn out, then suddenly sharp and ready for whatever comes next. He can sound like a man losing his grip and, a scene later, like the only clear-eyed person on that island. The contradiction runs through even the smallest physical business in the way he lifts a jacket off a chair or turns an object over in his hands, hinting at a history we’ll never be told.
The words are where he really gets you, though. Malkovich leans on every syllable, stretching sentences until each one feels deliberate, as if he knew these were the last lines he’d ever get to say and wanted to taste every one. It suits Chris perfectly, a man for whom talking has become a way of holding on. He tells rambling stories that sound like the harmless exaggerations of an old man, except the film never lets you fully dismiss them, and you start wondering which ones are actually confessions. His jokes about what already happened, or what’s coming, are tossed off so lightly that it takes a beat to realize they might not be jokes at all. The memoir recordings, Chris narrating his own life into a little machine, are where all of this comes together, and they’re the scenes I was most locked into.
Those recordings also reveal what Wild Horse Nine is really about. It wears the clothes of a spy thriller, but at heart it’s a character study about men staring at the end and adding up what their lives amounted to. Chris is essentially drafting his own epitaph, choosing which regrets to admit, which achievements to brag about, and which friendships deserve a mention. There’s something sad and a bit absurd about that exercise for a man whose career depended on nothing ever being written down. What does a life’s work add up to when you were never supposed to talk about it? McDonagh doesn’t hand over a clean answer. Lee, younger and with more road ahead, has to watch that reckoning up close, and every recording quietly asks him what his own tally will look like when his turn comes. That slow, shared accounting, more than any conspiracy, is what gives the movie its weight.
McDonagh also gives those reflections room to settle. Each time Chris hits record, the film drifts away from him into a montage of the island itself, and I loved this choice. Ben Davis, who also shot The Banshees of Inisherin, films Easter Island, where the production actually shot, with real patience: rolling green hills, the coastline, the ancient stone figures gazing out past everyone. Placed next to a dying man’s memories, those images put his whole life on a scale that dwarfs it. Carter Burwell, another longtime McDonagh collaborator, adds a meditative, melancholic score that never pushes an emotion, just lets it hang in the air.
None of this makes Wild Horse Nine a one-man show, and it isn’t the kind of awards vehicle where one towering performance props up an otherwise forgettable movie. Rockwell has every right to the same awards conversation Malkovich is getting. He’s proven he can carry a film on his own, and he’s been brilliant doing it more often than not, but when he takes a supporting part, I’d put him up there with the finest supporting actors I’ve ever watched. He always finds more in the role than the page seems to offer. Lee is a tricky one to play too because he has to stay something of a closed book. We’re never sure what’s eating at him, or whose side he’d pick if it came to that, and Rockwell keeps that uncertainty alive through small reactions rather than big tells.
Put the two together, and the movie truly comes alive. Chris and Lee bicker like an old married couple, and McDonagh writes their affection almost entirely through arguments, which is exactly why the rare unguarded moments of care hit so hard. One small gesture between them carries more feeling than any speech could. It also makes the friendship more complicated than it first looks. Lee learned his trade from Chris, including how to do terrible things without losing sleep, so their bond is real love built inside a profession that wrecked other people’s lives. The film keeps circling the question of what a protégé owes a mentor whose lessons were the problem in the first place.
The writing for these two is outstanding. Their exchanges are quick and extremely funny, but nearly every joke does a second job, revealing who these men are or poking at something uncomfortable about what they’ve done. That’s also why the tone works so well. I never felt The Banshees of Inisherin quite found the balance its darker turns needed, and here McDonagh nails it. The darkness never hides, so the comedy never feels like it’s covering for anything, and when the story grows heavier, the laughs don’t disappear so much as change flavor. The pacing helps, too. Developments arrive at a measured clip, neither rushed nor dragging, and there wasn’t a single stretch where my attention slipped away.
The politics get the same candor. McDonagh doesn’t tiptoe around what the CIA did in Chile and elsewhere, and there’s a bitter comedy in hearing these men discuss toppled governments with the casual pride of athletes reminiscing about old games. Buscemi is really good as MJ, the nervous institutional face of it all, a boss far more worried about what might get said than about what was done. Underneath, Wild Horse Nine treats men like Chris and Lee as America’s last cowboys, sent into other people’s countries to settle things their way, convinced they were wearing the white hats. That’s where the western DNA comes in: two aging gunslingers, a remote frontier, a final job, and the sense that their era is ending around them. Easter Island is an unusual stand-in for the Old West, but it works beautifully as the setting for a last ride.
I’ll admit the political ideas themselves didn’t blow me away. Most of what the movie says about American intervention isn’t new, even if it says it sharply. There’s one revelation about a character’s past, though, that’s going to leave plenty of viewers, Americans in particular, emotionally conflicted.
For all the intrigue, the puzzle at the center is modest. It isn’t heavily layered, it isn’t hard to follow, and you’ll likely see where it’s heading well before it arrives. That didn’t bother me at all because the mystery was never really the point. The climax is predictable and still enormously gripping since by then everything rides on two characters we’ve come to understand rather than on a twist. The rest of the ensemble holds up its end, too. Posey makes the most of her limited screen time, Di Girolamo grounds the students’ side of the story, and Tom Waits turns up as Chris’s brother.
I honestly don’t have much to hold against it. It isn’t especially surprising; it rarely shocks, and some of its rhythms will feel familiar to anyone who knows McDonagh’s earlier work. None of that dulled my experience. The swearing is relentless, and I couldn’t care less because it’s exactly how men like these would talk. The Catholic thread didn’t do much for me either. Chris’s faith felt less like something the film wants to wrestle with and more like a convenient way to steer the story, or a source for a few very funny anecdotes.
Above all, this is a wildly entertaining movie, packed with big laughs, and it’s going to win over audiences wherever it plays. Expect to see it on plenty of year-end lists. It’ll be on mine.
Final thoughts on Wild Horse Nine
Wild Horse Nine is one of my favorite films of the year! John Malkovich lives up to all the buzz with one of the best performances of his career, a magnetic bundle of contradictions who savors every syllable. Sam Rockwell, playing a man we can never quite read, deserves just as much awards attention. Martin McDonagh writes their bickering and tenderness with real wit and bite, and this time his balance between comedy and darkness is spot-on. Beneath the spy thriller sits a rich portrait of men facing death and taking stock of their lives, carried by Ben Davis’s contemplative images of Easter Island and Carter Burwell’s melancholic score. The politics are blunt, the sunset-western spirit fits like a glove, and a small yet intriguing puzzle still builds to a gripping climax. A secure spot in my year-end Top15.
Wild Horse Nine is in theaters now! What did you think about the film, if you’ve seen it? Share your thoughts on social media and tag @bsb.insider to keep the conversation going!
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