Wild Horse Nine Confirms Martin McDonagh Never Misses (and is Already Eyeing the Oscars)

At this point in his solid career, the only criticism one can make of McDonagh is that he is the classic type of director who always makes the same film. Only he does it damn well and, moreover, from an original idea, based on a screenplay he wrote himself. As in The Banshees of Inisherin, at the center of the film is a male friendship in crisis: that between two CIA agents stationed in Santiago, Chile, after the 1973 elections. Allende has just become the first democratically elected Marxist president in history, and the CIA is preparing to support the military coup that will lead to Pinochet's dictatorship. The film uses this involvement as a starting point to question what makes a democracy such, who guards its security, and what the point of no return is for those willing to accept only a very limited type of democratic freedom. Given the geopolitical premises and the frontal attack on the US strategy of international destabilization, it's not surprising that a certain Pablo Larraín is among the film's executive producers.

At least initially, however, politics remains in the background, because veteran agent Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are going to Easter Island to see the Moai, the large heads carved into black rock. Only their boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) asks Lee to get rid of his elderly colleague. Chris is not only losing his memory, but for some reason he reveals his identity and the imminent coup to unsuspecting left-wing students he met at the airport. The film tells of his change in attitude through the lens of Lee's torment. More people, for different reasons, ask him to get rid of a friend who is becoming a constant problem: for his memory lapses, for his dictated drafts of a memoir on a dictaphone in which he might be recounting how he killed JFK, for how he is undecided whether or not to trust the only person genuinely on his side, namely Lee. As irritating and contradictory as he is, Chris remains the only one who truly observes his colleague and understands, deep down, what it means to live with the knowledge of their profession.

The Friend Is, According to McDonagh

With its mysterious sculptures and wild horses grazing on the hills, the setting of Easter Island (where the film was shot) becomes the backdrop for the final evolution of this profound, fraternal friendship, which McDonagh, as a screenwriter, uses to deeply explore two themes, distilling painful, powerful truths. The first is mortality and its approach, which puts everything into a twilight perspective, prompting personal reflection. Chris has killed dozens of people for work, contributed to destabilizing countless countries, but like everyone, he finds himself looking back, lingering, wondering if things could have gone differently. It's a role that gives John Malkovich the chance to shine, thanks to the extreme cynicism of the words and realizations of a person deeply moved by the fragility of the lives of the moths infesting his closets, and who suddenly realizes he treated the moths with more regard than the human inhabitants of Chile. Dazed by morphine and illness, Chris is at times extraordinarily lucid in understanding what went wrong. Not so much in his own life, solitary and punctuated by arguments and silences, but in the History he helped shape, or rather, tamper with.

From Chile to the United States

Wild Horse Nine uses the friendship between Chris and Lee and their involvement in the CIA's shady dealings to question what went wrong in the United States. The film's answer is the death of JFK, which is explicitly attributed to the agency. One of the possible losses of innocence of the most powerful country in the world thus becomes the starting point for a broader parallel: that between a Chile on the verge of losing Allende and an America that, according to Chris, had already shown how limited its idea of democracy could become when election results threatened certain power balances.

Not that the nation was irreproachable before the Kennedy assassination, on the contrary, the script is keen to point out through Chris's words. That blatant assassination simply made visible distortions that were already present. It is here that the parallelism with Chile becomes more explicit: by intervening in its internal politics, the United States is exporting those same contradictions elsewhere, stifling at birth the possibility that others might develop what they also have negatively within themselves.

Even stronger, for a film that is not afraid to tackle politics, is Chris's incendiary final exhortation. A few days earlier, in a hilarious exchange with his friend, he explained that the main European and world democracies are "gay nations" and producers of excellent cheeses. His friend asks, perplexed, what democracy has to do with the mediocre American sliced cheese served for breakfast in their hotel, and here comes the provocation: democracy is needed to transform the intrinsic character of a nation (to "make it gay"), that is, to make it so sophisticated, open, and free that it can focus on producing high-quality cheeses. America precluded itself from that possibility when JFK's blood and brains splattered his wife's pink Chanel suit in Dallas.

The Political Provocation of Wild Horse Nine

In the end, the film takes this reasoning to its extreme consequences. If the institutions themselves intervene when a democracy takes a direction considered unacceptable, what space remains for real political freedom? Chris's answer is deliberately extreme, because the cognitive leap from agent and spy to terrorist is very short. Those who understand how the system works can either flee or try to destroy it preventively, resorting to terrorism. Every uniform, every policeman, every soldier, every child who dreams of becoming a good soldier when they grow up must be neutralized.

It is the enormous provocation of a director who returns to historical facts long analyzed and reconstructed in cinema, but goes much further in attributing responsibility to US services. The film does not hypothesize about the Kennedy assassination: it directly points to the CIA as the mastermind, linking that conviction to Chris's deep disillusionment with a military apparatus he sees as the ultimate instrument of power preservation, ready to activate when the population chooses candidates considered too progressive. Wild Horse Nine is therefore an extremely political film, much like One Battle After Another was. On the margins, almost in a whisper, it also builds a series of ruptures and reconciliations between the protagonists, cashing in on what was built emotionally in the grand finale, which will elicit more than a few sobs in the theater.

In both fields, the film is constructed with clockwork precision, fully realizing its premises, strong in its truly excellent writing (especially in the dialogues), now recognizable but difficult for others to imitate at this level. Wild Horse Nine is almost irritating in how complete and clean it is. It is a work almost entirely without flaws, the product of an author in absolute, complete control of his craft.