“Is this a joke?” asks a young Chilean woman early in Martin McDonagh’s new film, Wild Horse Nine. She is trying to grasp something said to her by another character; just as easily, however, she could be wondering exactly what kind of film she is in. For Wild Horse Nine itself is tonally unstable, mixing farcical events with historical drama and comic wordplay with an affecting portrait of male friendship.
This mixing of moods and blending of genres brings the film into alignment with McDonagh’s previous screen work as writer-director.
Beginning with In Bruges (2008) and continuing with Seven Psychopaths (2012), the Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), McDonagh has always tried to disorient his audiences. A hitman may speak with unexpected profundity, say, or a moment of whimsical dialogue might give way to a scene of disturbing violence.
Wild Horse Nine follows other McDonagh projects, too, in its careful attention to time and place. The action occurs in 1973: first in a bleakly rendered Chile, just before the US-engineered coup that overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende; then in visually sumptuous Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Two CIA agents, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), travel to the island to play out a complicated personal and political endgame.
One of the film’s many pleasures is its detailed presentation of this island landscape (Wild Horse Nine is only the second film to have been shot there, following Kevin Reynolds’s historical epic Rapa-Nui in 1994).
Many of the 1,000 or so monolithic figures (the moai), fashioned by indigenous inhabitants between approximately 1400 and 1650, figure in key scenes. They evoke a sense of deep time against which the brief drama of these American incomers is unfolding.
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