Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston has left the country, posting up this week in the Great White North to cover the 51st Toronto International Film Festival. As usual, and perhaps now more than ever, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing 2026 coverage, get rolling with our official curtain-raiser, and revisit the complete Vanyaland coverage archives from past TIFF editions.
Even though this is about as obvious a statement as one could make: No one can really write arguments between morons as Martin McDonagh can, and when his films lean on his dialogue more than their plotting, they’re typically something worth savoring. Such is the case with Wild Horse Nine, a sort of South American rework of In Bruges that manages to work quite well in spite of how familiar it feels. The otherworldly Moai and the lush lands of Easter Island serve as a good substitute for the Flemish Gothic architecture of the “Venice of the North,” and two CIA agents replace the hitmen, though most of the other characters from Bruges have a corresponding counterpart here. There’s regret, blood splatter, betrayal, and all that jazz. What fully sets the two apart is John Malkovich, who takes McDonagh’s words and crafts a vivid, texturally intriguing character from what might have been a toss-off, and has brilliant chemistry with his boneheaded foil, played by Sam Rockwell.
Honestly, most of this plays like a tribute to Malkovich, whose filmography seems to have an ur-character in Chris, the elder of the two CIA men on this weird journey. He and his partner, Lee (Rockwell), have been sent from Santiago to the Island by MJ (Steve Buscemi), the Chilean station chief, for what seems like a reasonable vacation. Chris has terminal cancer and, thanks to a lifetime of service (and, more importantly, the secrets that he accumulated along the way), the CIA’s letting him cross off one of the items on his “bucket list.” The man wants to see the “big heads,” as he calls them, before he heads to the Great Beyond, and, hey, if it gets him out of Santiago and, hopefully, into a coffin before he writes those memoirs he keeps talking about, great. Oh, did I mention that it’s 1973, and that Chris has a fondness for spooking the Allende-loving locales with all-too-certain predictions of the man’s demise? It’s also only 10 years after Chris’s involvement in another coup, one that went according to plan in Dealey Plaza and severed all his remaining ties to his family. His brother (Tom Waits) hit him with a potato for that one. Ouch.
Chris knows he’s there to die. He wants to die there, actually (though Venice might have been his first choice), and, being a good Catholic, he’s asked Lee to help him out when the time is right, though there aren’t any rabbits for him to pet out there. The irony of that isn’t really lost on him either – despite putting up a sarcastic/brave face, he’s starting to feel his burden’s weight, with untold numbers of sins done in the dark for what, ultimately, looks like a world that’s going to hell anyway. He stained his hands a deep crimson for little, and, when he meets Monica (Mariana di Girolamo), a student radical who takes a bizarre liking to him, he decides that he can, perhaps, bloody them once more to make at least one life a little better, to prevent one light from dimming right after his. Of course, MJ hates all of that shit, and is putting the screws on Lee to get on with it. But the truth is, the younger man really doesn’t want to kill his best buddy, who Lee can talk shit with and commiserate about his wife (Parker Posey, who gets the film’s best one-line gag) fucking around on him with a clown. Meanwhile, Chris just wants to hang with the wild horses and shoot up more morphine, but the clock is ticking.
Wild Horse Nine works best as a tribute to Malkovich, a wonderful actor who deserves the kind of late career laurels heaped upon his contemporaries of similar stature. In creating Chris, McDonagh smartly pieces together a patchwork collection of traits from his leading man’s filmography. Burn After Reading, Of Mice and Men, In the Line of Fire, Death of a Salesman, even Rounders and Being John Malkovich — it is the ur-Malkovich performance, and what’s incredible is how invisible the stitching is. He’s captivating, being funny, terrifying, and pathetic all at once, and we are never conned into outright supporting a man who, after his diagnosis, discovered that he had a thoroughly-starved soul. Nor do his regrets spur on a prototypical redemption arc — what he’s done is unforgivable, and his only advice to prevent men like him from reaching the levers of power is to kill them while they’re still children. It’s superlative-worthy work, and the rest of the ensemble mainly has to hit their cues right in order for the film to succeed. Rockwell has good, exasperated chemistry with Malkovich, Buscemi is well-placed as a petulant little creep, and di Girolamo is excellent in her intrigue and suspicion to his odd entreaties to her. She is the heart of the film, if there is one in a McDonagh piece.
That said, it’s really, really quite difficult not to see this as a retread of In Bruges with a greater emphasis placed on the sparse environment. It’s done to draw an explicit parallel with the Western — cowboy adventurism as the leading ethos of American diplomacy in the post-war world — and is demonstrated in its allusions to Monument Valley (where Waits character seemingly resides) and hired gun theatrics. But I got a sense that this is less The Searchers than The Wild Bunch, as it’s the end of an era for this breed of gun-for-hire campaigning on foreign soil. Chris’s end just so happens to happen before Watergate and the Church Commission, and his time has come. Whether not it’s trying to be elegiac or is particularly effective at the communicating the messages McDonagh wants to stress are up for debate, but I can tell you the sheer pleasure of scenes like the one in which Malkovich and Rockwell debate whether “gay” countries are the only ones in the world that produce good cheese are more than enough to recommend it as solid entertainment. Plus, hey, those are some big heads.