Review: ‘Wild Horse Nine’ left me both laughing and utterly terrified about what’s coming for us

I laughed a lot during Wild Horse Nine. This melancholy screwball caper about two CIA agents stuck on Easter Island sees McDonagh playing a familiar tune. Just like In Bruges, we have two men of dubious character trading barbs in a kind of geographic purgatory, with their rambling conversations dancing around the real point of their trip.

And yet, though this is a comedy, it also left me with a sense of deep unease about the future and worrying thoughts about how quickly and efficiently the rug can be yanked out from under a society. Those “rules” governing your country? They’re really more of a theory…

The core of the movie is elderly CIA officer Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich), who has terminal cancer and whose lips are growing a little too loose as the end approaches. Fellow CIA officer Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) is his friend, partner, and handler, not-too-subtly reporting to bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi) about the secrets Carlisle may or may not be revealing in his memoirs.

It can’t happen here

This is set against the background of the CIA-backed 1973 coup of democratically elected leftist leader Salvador Allende by the barbaric General Augusto Pinochet. The movie is set in the months before the coup, with these characters the architects of what will be a brutal and bloody 17-year dictatorship.

The dramatic tension between what the characters (and the audience) know is about to happen to Chile and the innocent optimism of the Chileans themselves is painful to see. That innocence and hope is perfectly embodied by Chilean actor Mariana di Girolamo as a Chilean student and activist who gets a horrifying sneak peek of the next few months.

The scene, in which Malkovich’s character casually outlines that tens of thousands of Chilean leftists and progressives are to be herded into the National Stadium where they will be tortured by the military, is the darkest comedy moment I’ve seen in years and one of the best scenes McDonagh has ever written. McDonagh wants the audience to understand that what happened in Chile isn’t some aberration of history, and that it can and will happen either to us or to people just like us.

After all, the United States is already at the masked paramilitaries dragging people from their houses stage (also the shooting civilians in the head in the street stage). Is it really so hard to imagine a future administration under, I dunno, President Pete Hegseth where the right makes good on their promise to root out and destroy the “communists” they insist are the actual reason everyone is poor and miserable?

At this point, I should once again emphasize that Wild Horse Nine is a comedy. A very funny comedy. Malkovich, Rockwell, and Buscemi are all hilarious, and McDonagh is by now an expert at showing us objectively horrible people who are also charismatic and charming.

Malkovich’s Chris Carlisle is the most successful example of this character type McDonagh has produced to date, doing a spinning plate act between drug addiction, sincere Catholicism, deep-seated regrets, and the limits of nihilism. Plus, McDonagh recognizes that Moai stone heads are inherently amusing in a surreal sort of way.

This is a career-best performance for Malkovich and one destined to dominate awards gossip. If he walks away with a fresh shelf of trophies early next year, he’s earned every single one of them. I wouldn’t count out Rockwell and di Girolamo for major nods either.

But, despite Wild Horse Nine making me laugh more than any other movie in recent memory (Resident Evil came a close second), it’s the quieter, sadder moments that are going to stick with me. Like Malkovich’s character giving us the inside scoop on the murder of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and his final words to him, or the dawning horror in a young progressive’s eyes as she realizes everything she fought for and won is about to be ground into dust and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

I have no idea if seasoned CIA officers with a couple of coups under their belts actually end their lives guilt-ridden, regretful, and knowing hell is waiting for them. I really hope they do.