So last Thursday I caught the first showing in my neck of the woods of the new Martin McDonagh film, Wild Horse Nine. He’s the filmmaker of many gems, including “The Banshees of Inisherin,” (2022), “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), and “In Bruges” (2008). “Banshees” might be my favorite, with Colin Farrell and Brendon Gleeson as Irish friends who have a falling out, not to mention a miniature donkey; “Three Billboards” has the inimitable Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell as frenemies, ‘nuff said; and last but certainly not least, the heartbreaking “In Bruges,” with Colin Farrell and Brendon Gleeson as contract killers with heart. What a lineup. All respect to Christopher Nolan but McDonagh might be the best filmmaker on the planet.
Now along comes Wild Horse Nine. It has many similarities to In Bruges: A pair of misfits (in this case, CIA agents) travel to a scenic landscape (Rapa Nui, the island otherwise known as Easter Island) to do some sightseeing and possibly kill some people. Like the tagline above: “Shoot first. Sightsee later.” In this case the sightseeing comes first. There is some shooting, though I’ll leave out the details. The CIA agents are played by Sam Rockwell as the somewhat-younger and anchored Lee, whose main character traits are a wry sense of humor, obvious respect and honor of his pal Chris, and a love/hate relationship with his ex-wife, Margie, played by the always sassy Parker Posey. John Malkovich plays Chris, the older CIA agent who knows the whereabouts of the mythical missing assassination rifle used to kill John F. Kennedy in 1963. It’s a detail that slips out early in Wild Horse Nine and comes to great importance by the end.
I don’t think it’s giving too much away to note that in Wild Horse Nine John Malkovich steals the show. He pets the wild horses of Rapa Nui and sets the tone. A kind of remorseful sadness haunts Chris. an acknowledgment of guilt and good intentions gone awry. He’s burdened by the past—certainly a theme of McDonagh’s—and has supposedly killed sixty-eight people. In his interactions with Lee and a pair of Chilean young women you can sense he carries the weight of those murders. He’s dying of cancer and all bets are off. He says and does whatever he feels like, including blurting out to strangers that they are CIA agents up to no good. Chris and Lee are ostensibly part of the early infiltration efforts of the CIA to destabilize and quash the newly elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Chris tells the Leftist young women all of their plans for detentions and torture and kidnapping, and instructs them, “Do not get in the car,” when they’re accosted by government forces under the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
But that’s not the main focus of Wild Horse Nine. Chris’s redemption and his dying wishes come first and foremost. For one thing, they travel to Easter Island because Chris always wanted to go there and see the “big head” statues—otherwise known as moai. And supposedly that’s where he wants to die. At the hands of Lee. Plus his memory is going bad. Lee isn’t sure Chris even remembers asking Lee to kill him. To make matters more confusing, Chris suddenly wants to go to Venice, Italy and insists that’s where he wants to die, amongst the canals and the gondolas.
What actually happens twists those themes and dying wishes into knots and unties the guilt that binds Chris.
But Wild Horse Nine is also graced with terrific small parts and cameos: Steve Buscemi plays a heroin-addicted CIA boss who gives a surprisingly astute scenery-chewing speech on sadness as the state of human experience. Tom Waits, who has to be crowned the King of Cameos, appears as Chris’s long-lost brother, Jim, living in Monument Valley, Arizona. He cryptically tells Chris, “You shouldn’t have done it.” Like Waits’s recent appearance in Jim Jarmuch’s much under-appreciated triptych masterpiece Father Mother Sister Brother (2025), he’s subtle, funny, and poignant. And Parker Posey is a sassy, cantankerous woman who seems to know all the secrets, and is something of a pawn in the CIA’s ruthless maneuvers.
Ultimately it’s a sad film. Malkovich steals the show and breaks our hearts. But he does manage to find some redemption, I think, in the end.