‘Wild Horse Nine’ Review: John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell Make a Perfect Pair in Martin McDonagh’s Poignant, Blood-Dipped Buddy Comedy

Start with the wry humor of In Bruges’ fractious hitmen, out of their natural element in a picturesque tourist destination, then stir in the melancholic island setting of The Banshees of Inisherin, a haunted place of solitude and self-reflection. That lands you in the territory of Martin McDonagh’s shape-shifting tragicomedy Wild Horse Nine. But the longing for peaceful deliverance and perhaps even atonement that ripples through the writer-director’s fifth feature makes it uniquely affecting, resonating in ways both personal and political.

Sam Rockwell’s skill with the spiky cadences of McDonagh’s witty, explosively sweary dialogue has already been proven in Seven Psychopaths and most notably Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which landed him an Oscar for his role as the doltish racist cop lacking the tools to turn his life around. (Rockwell also starred on Broadway in McDonagh’s invigoratingly nasty 2010 play, A Behanding in Spokane.) That means the actor’s nuanced, funny-sad performance here is no surprise.

The real revelation is John Malkovich, a brilliant actor who can veer into self-caricature in lesser vehicles, here building infinite layers into a plum role that is his best in years, ranking with his finest work.

Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran CIA agent who has dirtied his hands in just about every shady U.S. intelligence intervention in global politics of the 1950s and ‘60s — Guatemala, Congo, Indonesia, Bay of Pigs — along with some much closer to home. What makes the character so rewarding for both actor and audience is that Chris by necessity has never been a man of conscience. But his encroaching mortality and cognitive decline have brought him closer to self-reckoning, without erasing the sardonic throwaway humor with which he seems to regard even the gravest of matters. 

Watching him exasperate Rockwell’s Lee, the easily angered sidekick agent to whom he served as a mentor, with comments that range from badinage to sly obfuscation, yields precisely the kind of wicked two-character exchanges that are McDonagh’s forte. 

Chris and Lee have been dispatched to Santiago, Chile, in 1973, working under the agent’s tetchy head of South American operations, MJ. This is a gift of a role for Steve Buscemi, who follows The Only Living Pickpocket in New York with a further demonstration of why he’s one of our most treasured character actors, peerless in his handle on profane irascibility.

With Chris’ memory deteriorating as his inoperable cancer spreads, MJ has grown concerned about the agent’s purported plan to dash out a memoir while his powers of recall are still somewhat reliable, alerting the grizzled chief to the risk of compromising information getting out. Having shared a whim with Lee to visit Easter Island and see “the giant heads,” Chris embarks with his partner on an ostensibly recreational trip that becomes one in which the burdens of their shared past grow increasingly uncomfortable and the suspicion that both men, along with MJ, have ulterior motives slowly comes into focus.

Before they even depart the Santiago airport, Chris has already made Lee and the all-seeing MJ nervous by getting into a flirty exchange with two young left-leaning college students traveling to the same destination, Monica (Mariana Di Girólamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas). With a nonchalance that could be joking, teasing, confessional or pure fabrication, Chris warns them not to get too comfortable with president Salvador Allende, hinting that the CIA is pulling strings to destabilize the country’s democracy. McDonagh never forces the relevance to contemporary American interventionism, but it resonates all the same.

The young women dismiss Chris as a random creep. But in his dapper suits and ties, paisley shirts, suspenders and pork pie hat, a half-smile of contentment forever lighting up his face, this ailing septuagenarian gives the impression of having once been an irresistible charmer. Listening to him expound on “the gay countries” (France, Holland and England among them) and their superior cheeses or the invention of the Molotov cocktail is delightful.

McDonagh amusingly anticipates the rise of political correctness and its backlash by decades when Chris and Lee, both seasoned assassins, get hostile with tourists sanctimoniously correcting them on the use of Indigenous names for Easter Island and its famous sentinel-like stone heads: Rapa Nui and Moai. 

That vein continues when Monica and Alicia overhear Chris prattling on about one of the smaller statues resembling a dwarf and then musing that sex with a dwarf is something he never experienced. “This is a sacred site!” Monica reminds him. The dwarfism motif also figures in Chris’ recollection of a foolproof method he developed in Ireland to catch a bombing target off-guard, an anecdote that has mischievous echoes later in the movie.

The fiendish ingenuity — and unexpected soulfulness — of McDonagh’s plotting allows the film to grow meandering and dreamy once Chris and Lee settle into neighboring rooms at their bungalow-style hotel and begin their touristic exploration. But their sightseeing also lays ground for an almost imperceptible shift into pathos, deepened by Chris’ spiritual connection with the island’s wild horses.

As Chris dictates discursive thoughts for his memoir into a tape recorder and ponders what it might be like to die in Venice, Lee fields calls from both his panicked wife Marge (Parker Posey) at their American desert home and an increasingly pissed MJ, whose suspicions prompt him to board a flight to the island. That sets in motion a bloody yet strangely lyrical and moving climax in which McDonagh continually subverts expectations.

While fans of the director’s plays might bemoan his absence from the theater, his last three films have showcased a masterful ability to offset corrosive dark comedy with searing poignancy, never more stealthily than here. There’s aching sadness in the crumpled, hand-written reminder notes Chris stashes in his pockets for moments of confusion — “Remember that you’re dying,” “Don’t trust Lee.”

McDonagh draws transcendant performances entirely plugged into the subtle tonal shifts in the material from Malkovich and Rockwell, both of whom bring emotional weight to the film’s insights into male friendship and loyalty. 

In addition to the redoubtable Buscemi, the ensemble benefits from the acerbic work of Posey, who spirals into hysteria as CIA meddling becomes a more immediate threat (“How are the kids?” Lee asks during one call. “Who cares?!” Marge snaps back.) There’s lovely input from Di Girólamo (Pablo Larraín’s Ema) as a woman fearful of Chris’ unpredictable behavior but also sensitive to the awareness that he’s going through something major; and Tom Waits makes a flavorful single-scene appearance as Chris’ estranged brother, who receives a surprise phone call at his remote Monument Valley cabin.

Cinematographer Ben Davis, who has shot all of McDonagh’s films since Seven Psychopaths, as always shows a stirring feel for the locations. Drone footage of the Rapa Nui coastline backed by the sweet sound of Harry Belafonte singing “Island in the Sun” is utterly seductive, and the Moai have rarely held such power onscreen as monolithic silent witnesses. The melodic score by another longtime collaborator, Carter Burwell, ideally crystallizes the movie’s changing moods.

Wild Horse Nine is another memorable addition to McDonagh’s distinctive body of work and a late-career high for Malkovich, whose knack for hiding and revealing his character’s feelings at the same time makes Chris an uncommonly thoughtful antihero.