‘Wild Horse Nine’ review: John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell command Martin McDonagh’s potent 1970s character study | Reviews

Dir/scr: Martin McDonagh. UK/US. 2026. 119mins

It’s 1973, and US CIA agents are working undercover in the Chilean capital of Santiago to destabilise the country following the election of socialist prime minister Salvador Allende. It’s a juicy premise for a real-life period thriller – except writer/director Martin McDonagh is far more interested in the personal than the political, and Wild Horse Nine is richer for it. That volatile era proves a resonant backdrop for this character study of two men facing a personal reckoning and, alongside electric performances from John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, the film benefits from McDonagh’s expert blend of poignant drama, meaty dialogue and blistering gloomy comedy.

 Electric performances from John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell

A premiere in Venice competition kicks off a vigorous journey for McDonagh’s fifth feature, which will play multiple festivals including Toronto and London before opening in the US and UK/Ireland on November 6. It is likely to see McDonagh back in sedate awards contention following various Oscar nominations for The Banshees Of Inisherin (2023), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2018) and In Bruges (2009). (He won in 2006 for low film Six Shooter.) And while Rockwell and Malkovich shoulder the bulk of the film, forceful support from Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey, plus impressive apply of craft, make this a solid all-rounder.

Grainy archive footage of early 1970s Chile celebrates the election of Allende, who promises to usher in a recent democratic era. But underneath this optimism lies a gloomy current of geopolitical corruption and collusion – one that, history tells us, will lead to General Pinochet’s violent military coup in September 1973. Hardened CIA agents Lee (Rockwell, who starred in Three Billboards and McDonagh’s 2012 Los Angeles-set comedy Seven Psychopaths) and veteran Chris (Malkovich) know exactly what’s coming; under the bullish leadership of bureau chief MJ (Buscemi), they approach their task of disrupting Chile’s newfound stability with a sense of detached indifference.

Soon, however, Lee and Chris are off to the Chilean territory of Easter Island (or, to give it its Indigenous name, Rapa Nui), captured in stunning detail by cinematographer Ben Davis, reteaming with McDonagh after Psychopaths, Banshees and Billboards. (Only one previous feature has shot on the island, 1994’s Rapa Nui.) Working with digital filters, Davis lends the film a gritty, weather-beaten ’70s texture, while allowing natural colours to pop. The production leans into McDonagh’s tradition of place as character, taking full advantage of this remote, ethereal island with its giant heads and wild horses, green fields and white cliffs contrasting sharply with Santiago’s steely greys and pointed angles. 

Lee and Chris are ostensibly on vacation, but the exact nature of their trip slowly reveals itself via petite flourishes – a phone call, a scribbled note. Muscular, elegant editing from Mikkel E G Nielsen (also from Banshees) employs flashbacks and pointed cuts to shape and re-shape the narrative.

Just as McDonagh’s previous works have pivoted on the absurdities of human relationships, so Wild Horse Nine is framed around the considerable chemistry between Rockwell’s firebrand Lee and Malkovich’s world-weary Chris. There are forceful echoes of both In Bruges and Banshees here, with the foregrounding of an intense male friendship that blurs personal and professional boundaries, and finds itself under duress in an isolated location. As Lee documents the trip through his Super 8 camera and Chris records his rambling memoirs onto a Dictaphone, ideas of trust and memory are layered onto a screenplay that is primarily concerned with the shapeshifting nature of truth.

McDonagh’s screenplay is obviously filtered through the prism of retrospect, with full awareness of the horrors of what happened in Chile – and elsewhere, as Chris is revealed to have been the architect of many such operations (including, in a through-line joke, the Kennedy assassination). But the film resists didacticism, establishing the facts through careful detailing. The CIA office faces Santiago’s presidential palace, where the military coup will play out. Chilean musician Victor Jara (Aron Hernandez) visits Easter Island just months before his murder. In somewhat more obvious characterisations, Buscemi’s MJ, with his crisp suit and clipped manner, represents the shady old-world establishment, while free-spirited Chilean students Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailin Salas), also holidaying on the island, embody the change on the horizon.

More interestingly, Chris and Lee find themselves drifting somewhere in the middle of these ideologies, increasingly unsure of where their loyalties should lie. Chris – whose muted costuming reflects both his shadowy profession and his dull mental state – is brash, offensive and clearly deadly, but is also vulnerable and sympathetic as he wrestles with his past. It’s an expertly balanced performance from Malkovich, whose famously laconic delivery and baleful expression give Chris the sense of a cowboy facing his final rodeo. That is emphasised by the character’s affiliation with the island’s horses, and Carter Burwell’s elegiac, romantic Western-tinged score, which also brings in Pacific instrumentation.

Rockwell, too, plays to his strengths, lending Lee a charismatic swagger – matched by his colourful clothes and ostentatious Stetson, that symbol of blunt American masculinity – but always in touch with the powerful emotions swirling under the surface. Lee’s telephone conversations with his wine-soaked wife Marge (Posey, sharply entertaining) back home in New Mexico are neat vignettes which offer an insight into Lee’s life, and his relationship with Chris. It’s the latter that ultimately powers the film: the pair’s entertaining odd-couple bickering tinged with touching affection, their friendship unshakeable even as the world falls to pieces around them.