"WILD HORSE NINE" - MINI-REVIEW

What is a dying veteran CIA agent to leave behind apart from a string of dead bodies? A memoir? Poetry? One last trip? Gratitude for life? More dead bodies? How about all the above?

Beautiful, elegiac, dark and absurdly, wonderfully funny, WILD HORSE NINE is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s most overall successful film since IN BRUGES, and my personal favorite of his filmography. This 1970s-set CIA buddy comedy sends John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell (as Chris and Lee, McDonagh’s stock-and-trade pair of acerbic, Catholic guilt-ridden bad men—well, bad only because they kill people) from Santiago, Chile to Easter Island for one last hurrah, which may end one of three ways, and none of them good.

Here, McDonagh’s loose, least-spastic plot (that is, a plot in which things don’t just happen so the movie can happen) resembles that of a Hal Ashby movie, as Chris and Lee check out Easter Island’s “big heads,” ruminate on topics like the ratio of how gay a country is to how good their cheese is, if there will be dinosaurs in heaven, and what their lives as government-sanctioned killers has cost the countries affected, including their own. That WILD HORSE NINE is mostly a hangout movie (with just enough plot to keep the motor running) allows for McDonagh’s deeper, thematically rich questions to really work on its audience, and gives us one of John Malkovich’s most soulful and relatable performances (he is my current Best Actor pick).

The film also features brief but terrific turns from Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey and Tom Waits, along with the relatively fresh faces of Chilean actress Mariana di Girolamo and Brazilian actress Ailín Salas as a pair of students who have been warned by Chris  “not to return to their recently destabilized country.” It also boasts wonderful period production design by Denis Schnegg, naturalistic cinematography by McDonagh regular Ben Davis, and a reflective, foreboding score by Carter Burwell.

While I like elements of all of his films, I run a little hot and cold on McDonagh’s work, which includes SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS (2012), THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE, EBBING, MISSOURI (2017) and THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022), but here’s a film in which everything comes together. A life-and-death comic lark on the fleeting beauty of humanity, and one of my favorite films of 2026.

WILD HORSE NINE opens in theaters Friday, November 6.

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