In writer-director Martin McDonagh’s debut film, In Bruges, two hit men hide out in the eponymous Belgian city, waiting for a call from their boss. The older man, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), loves playing the tourist. “Bruges is the most well-preserved medieval town in all of Belgium, apparently,” he recites from his guidebook. His companion, Ray (Colin Farrell), disdains the provincial pleasures of what he calls “fucking Bruges.” “I used to hate history, didn’t you?” he says. “It’s all just a load of stuff that already happened.” But Ray is so racked with guilt over a botched hit, no wonder he’d rather pretend the past didn’t happen. The only problem is that he sees it everywhere he looks.
Wild Horse Nine, McDonagh’s fifth and most recent feature film, is structured a lot like In Bruges. Both center on two men wandering through an exotic locale, largely unimpressed, frustrated by one another and consumed by regret. The order to kill or be killed forces one of them to choose between personal loyalty and professional duty. For the men of In Bruges, this duty is to the ethical code of the hit man. In Wild Horse Nine, contract killers have been replaced by CIA agents, glorified mercenaries who are bound to protect not democracy so much as American interests.
Wild Horse Nine isn’t just built like a McDonagh movie: It sounds and thinks like one too. Having started his career as a playwright with The Beauty Queen of Lehane and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, McDonagh still writes the kind of dialogue—witty, too witty at times—meant to be played to the back row. The billboards in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri constitute a near-haiku of minimalist free verse: Raped while dying / And still no arrests? / How come, Chief Willoughby? In response to his wife’s postcoital dirty talk in that movie, Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) jokes that he thinks he’s heard that line in a Shakespeare play. “You dummy. It’s Oscar Wilde,” his wife (Abbie Cornish) flirts back.
It is that tension between sweeping cinematic vistas and peculiar, theatrical language that produces McDonagh’s signature effect: pleasing, jarring, a bit off kilter. To watch these actors proclaim their odd thoughts, impeccably expressed while roaming the dusty Midwest or the streets of a medieval city or the vividly saturated Irish coast is to recall how all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players (hint: not Oscar Wilde this time).
In Wild Horse Nine, set in the early 1970s in the wake of a string of dubious ops, CIA agents Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are invaders, colonizers, sowers of chaos and violence across the globe and even, we discover, at home. Are these men deserving of their outsize influence, deputized, as they are, by the U.S. government? Not at all. They only approach something like worthiness once they realize they should never have had such power in the first place.
The result is a film more nuanced in its understanding of American exceptionalism than Three Billboards, more political than In Bruges, and just as beautifully lonely as The Banshees of Inisherin. Then again, as Lee half-heartedly tells his friend, “It’s lonely everywhere if you’re gonna die, right?” And if there’s one way we know for sure we are in a McDonagh story, be it a play or a film, it is that death is waiting in the wings.
The main action of Wild Horse Nine takes place on Easter Island. The Moai statues feel tailor-made for an auteur obsessed with dismemberment as a metaphor, providing an immediate dose of violence while promising more bloodshed to come. Anywhere from 500 to 800 years old, the Moai direct stony glares at tourists, but Lee and Chris are not cowed; they irreverently refer to them as the “big heads.”
This odd couple has landed here because Chris said he wanted to see the Moai before he died. He doesn’t remember this wish, though Chris, suffering from cancer-induced dementia, is liable to forget he is dying at all. What Chris knows, and what he has been letting slip in these final days, might get him killed before his illness finishes him. At the very least, his insensitivity will tank his chances at an Easter Island hookup.
Though Chris is the one on a journey, stricken with guilt at the end of his life—for all the deaths he has caused or for which he has been in the “general area”—Lee is the one with a choice to make. Will he murder his friend because he has asked him to do so before his illness becomes untenable, or will he murder his friend because his boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi), has asked him to? “I wish I could die knowing I could trust you,” Chris remarks. It is an impossible dilemma, patently absurd, which is to say, textbook McDonagh: Silly moments are tainted with dread, and doom and death are shot through with silliness.
Chris poses a special threat to the agency because he has chosen to write a memoir, which would, presumably, cover his involvement with the agency-directed hit of America’s thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. “How’re you gonna write that memoir if you can’t remember anything?” Lee inquires. Chris, unbothered, decides to begin his book with a discussion of a dinosaur afterlife, asking Chris, “Didn’t they have, like, vegetarian dinosaurs?” (Wild Horse Nine, keeping company with the 2011 The Tree of Life and this summer’s The End of Oak Street, proves that, when one’s own past proves too burdensome, dinosaurs have the power to bridge the gap between right now and back then, our personal traumas and our shared cultural memories.)
The first third of the film feels light, almost surface-level, as characters banter about beautiful women, unfaithful wives, and which countries have the best cheese (the gayest countries, Chris insists). It makes sense that, in a film about state secrets, talking in code, and cognitive decline, we might feel, as viewers, that something is being redacted. But, as MJ turns the screws on Lee and Chris decides he actually wants to die in, in his words, “Venice, Italy,” the film becomes darker and more claustrophobic. At a bar, Chris tells the two Chilean students they have befriended (Mariana di Girolamo, Ailín Salas) not to go back to their country ahead of what will be the 1973 Chilean coup. He details the horrors to be inflicted on scores of young leftists, their friends and family, and warns them, “Never let them get you in the car,” advising her, instead, to “die in the street.” The allusion to this unspeakable violation earns him a slap across the face, though this warning later proves prescient and invaluable.
While McDonagh’s previous film, The Banshees of Inisherin, is as sweeping as a fairytale, Wild Horse Nine feels more like a play, with its limited settings: a nondescript hotel room, a CIA office, the tacky ordinariness of a 1970s home. It is the disembodied Moai, looking on in judgment, that provide the film’s most compelling visual hook, together with a Kodak Ektachrome–inspired aesthetic. Lee and Chris, dressed in muddy oranges, yellows, and browns, clash with the panoramic swaths of clear blues and greens of Easter Island. The film’s evocatively dated look can be attributed, first, to cinematographer (and regular McDonagh collaborator) Ben Davis, who filmed in a combination of digital and 16mm/super-8 film, and to the makeup team, who curated the delightfully clownish makeup looks for Lee’s wife, Marge (Parker Posey).
And, like a play, Wild Horse Nine relies on its performers above all, with long takes and even longer monologues, pronounced against relatively blank staging. Rockwell, a McDonagh regular, turns in a heartfelt performance, cranky but sincere, and plays well with Parker Posey (another White Lotus alum), who executes her small, messy performance with precision. Buscemi is appropriately menacing, though he is even better playing his character’s weaselly vices for comic purposes. But the film belongs to John Malkovich, with his odd speech cadences, his unnerving glare, and his ability to shift, seamlessly, from levity to murderous violence.
One of the most memorable moments in the soundtrack, played as the two men drive across Easter Island, is Judy Collins’s sweet, melancholy 1967 rendition of “Both Sides Now.” “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” she sings, but it is “life’s illusions” she recalls. For most of Chris’s career, he has forced himself to believe, as Lee puts it, that “sometimes [you] gotta do a terrible thing for the greater good.” But, as the end of his life draws near, he sees from the other side. He advises his young, naïve friend: “Any time you see a man in uniform … kill him.”
So much for bothsidesism. Spoken by a man seeking to undo all that he has set in motion, Chris’s words are not enough to change the course of history, and he knows it. But as a piece of art, Wild Horse Nine is a powerful work of cinematic intelligence, McDonagh having given us a period piece that feels all too much of the present.
