Review: WILD HORSE NINE

 by Rob DiCristino

Goodbye, #ScaryMovieMonth! Hello, Awards Season!

Kane Parsons’ Backrooms may have codified “liminal spaces” as 2026’s buzziest internet term — replacing “aesthetic” and “lore” from recent years — but perhaps no filmmaker understands the true psycho-spiritual weight of liminal spaces like Irish auteur Martin McDonagh, whose work often explores the existential purgatory between the sins of our past and the uncertainties of our future. Completing a loose “Sad Boys in Beautiful Places” trilogy that began with In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh elevates this tried-and-true formula by setting his newest film, Wild Horse Nine, against the CIA-backed military coup that took place in Chile in the fall of 1973. When Agency chief MJ (Steve Buscemi) sends veteran operatives Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) to oversee the removal of Marxist Salvador Allende, he has no idea that their celebratory jaunt to nearby Easter Island is actually the last stop in Chris’ retirement tour: He has terminal cancer, we learn, and he’s running out of time to atone for his sins.

Played with Malkovich’s characteristic blend of beleaguered exasperation and pig-in-shit glee, Chris has spent the better part of his career engineering the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities: Long before he conspired to depose Allende, he watched the execution of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and — though he’d rather not talk too much about this in mixed company — may have been somewhere in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. Despite these and countless other unspeakable acts on his ledger, though, Chris isn’t the nationalist attack dog his behavior would suggest. Rather, he treats the political chaos he’s created as a fait accompli, the inevitable byproduct of interactions between flawed, selfish, misguided human beings. There’s a jaded banality to the war stories he tells Lee — his longtime partner-turned-end-of-life caregiver — a foul air, more than anything else, of disappointment. In the end, Chris laments, toppling even the greatest civilizations really requires little more than handing some guy a rifle and watching while he pulls the trigger.

This is all trying news for Lee, a middle-aged buttonman teetering on the edge of divorce (from Parker Posey’s Marge) and desperate to handle his job with a degree of inalienable emotional distance. Chris’ plan to commit suicide — which MJ tasks Lee with delaying until they’re positive Chris hasn’t squirreled away any incriminating artifacts from Dallas — complicates Lee’s ability to keep that distance, to remain detached from the political fervor of leftist activists like Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), whom Chris advises to get the hell out of Santiago before the shit hits the fan. Drop the idealism, he tells the awestruck young women; abandon your principles and think for yourself. It may sound like easy cynicism, but it’s not that simple. No, in classic McDonagh fashion, Chris’ frustration with his fellow man has evolved into a dogged insistence on a higher authority. It’s not quite religion — McDonagh isn’t so cruel as to moralize like that — but a newfound focus on the simple things: Good cheese, for example, and the “big heads” of Easter Island.

Longtime McDonagh loyalists will feel right at home with this sort of absurdist fixation on left-handed thoughts — “Will there be dinosaurs in heaven? Because they’re not all bad, right? Didn’t they have vegetarian dinosaurs?” — and while it’s easy to dismiss these musings as Sorkin-esque crutches that prevent a writer from reaching their full potential (not to mention the fact that it’s all a little lighthearted in the face of real-world events; Chris isn’t some jamoke assassin, after all; he’s personally responsible for thousands of deaths and the moral corruption of the greatest democracy in the history of the world), there’s an argument to be made that Wild Horse Nine’s generally tossed-off sensibilities actually underline the profundity of Chris’ worldview. He and Lee kill people for a living. They destabilize governments and destroy the grand designs of men and women who’ve devoted themselves to causes they can neither understand nor appreciate. Who but they should be forced to fixate on all the essential nuts and bolts of our pointless existence?

Wild Horse Nine’s plottier second half will undercut some of these lofty thoughts — Marge’s kidnapping, MJ’s hunt for the Dallas rifle; it feels a little perfunctory when we know that the end goal is to let Chris die in peace — and McDonagh offers few solutions to the impossible contradictions of our society on which he asks us to ruminate. What matters, though, as in In Bruges and Banshees of Inisherin, is that we’re ruminating on them together. What matters is that Malkovich and Rockwell give career-best performances and that McDonagh sets them against some of the most striking locales we’ve seen this year short of The Odyssey. It may be true that Wild Horse Nine asks us to sympathize with vicious, immoral instruments of an unfeeling state. But after watching it twice, it mostly just reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut and his envelope: The American author once went out to buy a single envelope. He didn’t need to, but he wanted to see the babies. And the fire trucks. He wanted to fart around. Despite our self-aggrandizing aspirations, that’s all we’re really here for: To fart around.

Wild Horse Nine hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, November 6th.