‘Wild Horse Nine’ Review: A Dying Spy, a Tape Recorder and a Very Strange Vacation

Martin McDonagh has built a career on pairing two sparring men in a beautiful, isolated place and letting the jokes and the grief pile up together. ‘In Bruges’ did it with hitmen in Belgium, and ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ did it with a friendship falling apart on an island. ‘Wild Horse Nine‘ reaches theaters on November 6 through Searchlight Pictures, and this time John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell take the sparring seats.

The year is 1973 and the place is Santiago, Chile, where CIA agents Chris and Lee have been helping prepare the military coup that will bring Augusto Pinochet to power. With the groundwork done, they fly to Easter Island for what looks like a holiday. Chris is dying of cancer, his mind is starting to drift, and he has begun recording a memoir that his boss MJ, played by Steve Buscemi, is nervous about.

Here is what surprised me most. For all its gallows humour, this is a mournful film, and the jokes about cheese, dinosaurs and the afterlife work as a way of dodging a man’s conscience rather than escaping it. The comedy never fully hides the regret, and that tension is what gives the story its pull. I went in expecting a wisecracking spy caper and came out thinking about how a person faces the end of a violent life.

Malkovich is the reason to buy a ticket. He plays Chris as someone who rambles, offends and blurts out state secrets in public, then reveals real remorse almost without warning. His quieter exchanges with the young Chilean student Monica, played by Mariana di Girolamo, land harder than any of his big speeches.

Rockwell plays Lee as the exhausted minder, caught between loyalty to an old friend and orders from above. His bickering with Malkovich feels lived in, like two men who have said everything to each other except the one thing that matters. Even when the script turns silly, the two of them keep the friendship believable.

The film is less sure footed elsewhere. Parker Posey, Tom Waits and the Chilean students get too little to do, and the women in particular can feel like afterthoughts in a story about two men. The humour also settles into a predictable rhythm, and anyone who knows McDonagh’s earlier work will see the beats coming before they land.

The political backdrop deserves a mention too. The story touches on American meddling in Chile, but it treats that history more as a mood than an argument, and the film cares more about Chris’s soul than about what his actions cost the country. Ben Davis shoots Rapa Nui with a patient eye, and the rolling hills and wild horses give the island a beauty that these men barely seem to deserve. It is a rough, violent ride in places, as the R rating suggests, but the beauty keeps pulling you back in.

‘Wild Horse Nine’ is not McDonagh breaking new ground, yet it is a funny, sad and often moving farewell anchored by a career best turn from Malkovich. The familiar formula holds up, the tenderness sneaks past the bleakness, and the final stretch hit me harder than I expected. I give it 8 out of 10.

Do you agree with my verdict on ‘Wild Horse Nine’, and has Martin McDonagh still got it, so share your thoughts in the comments?