Kill the Jockey

After spending just a few minutes with the diminutive, dysfunctional jockey played by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s hard to imagine being surprised by any fate that might befall him, with a victory at the Gran Premio Carlos Pellegrini seeming no less likely than a Looney Tunes-style anvil falling on his head. Kill the Jockey exists somewhere between the surreal and the cartoonish, a mostly compelling, sometimes unreconciled tension that co-writer/director Luis Ortega rides all the way to the finish line.

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When first we meet him, Remo is passed out in a Buenos Aires bar while still clad in his racing silks, helmet, and sunglasses. He’s then ferried to his next big race, which he prepares for by mixing whisky with horse tranquilizer. He takes a drag from his cigarette and blows the smoke into his glass before downing the whole concoction in one potent, visually arresting gulp. “Misfortune is the best school,” the mobster who acts as Remo’s patron says of him after he falls off his saddle the moment the race starts. If that’s true, Remo is nothing short of a scholar, though the trauma that shaped him into the self-destructive person we see before us is mostly mentioned in passing.

For his part, Remo seems unconcerned with what everyone else can recognize as a clear downward spiral. “They won’t do anything to me,” he says to his long-suffering girlfriend (Úrsula Corberó). “I’m profitable.” Abril, a jockey herself, isn’t convinced — something made clear less from her words than from her expression. The film was shot by the masterful Finnish cinematographer Timo Salminen, a frequent collaborator of his countryman Aki Kaurismäki, and it shows. Salminen frames Biscayart, Corberó, and the horses they ride the way a portraitist might, with high-contrast lighting that casts a faint glow and accentuates every unique feature of their faces. Kill the Jockey finds substance through style, of which it has oodles.

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There are enough bright colors, chic clothing, and beautiful visages to fill the pages of Vogue. There’s more than one dance sequence that will have you tapping your feet, nodding your head, and fighting the urge to get up and bust a move yourself. The movie doesn’t have an austere bone in its body, with Ortega making a case for excess as a virtue unto itself. He’s quite persuasive in this. Kill the Jockey is a movie for people who like movies that make the utmost use of every available cinematic tool, from needle-dropping musical cues to the arresting power of images you weren’t expecting but can’t look away from: a Japanese horse on a transport plane, twin sisters overlooking a relative’s hospital bed.

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Kill the Jockey finds substance through style, of which it has oodles.

After his first race on that horse, which was flown halfway across the world for him, Remo sustains injuries that his doctor describes as “not compatible with life.” (You never want to hear the words “anomaly” and “MRI” in the same sentence.) And yet he wakes up all the same, albeit with one eye having turned a different color and no longer registering any weight when he steps on the scale. Your initial assumption might be that only Remo’s subconscious has departed his hospital bed and that everything else in the film from this point on is a deathbed vision. The reality is slightly less fanciful, as is the rest of the film.

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Remo spends the second half of his story with a comically large bandage on his head and poorly applied makeup on his face, though he hasn’t assumed a new identity so much as made good on a promise he made to Abril after asking what he could do to make her love him again. “Die and be reborn,” was her answer, and the genderfluid persona of Dolores, it seems, is his resurrection. Kill the Jockey is too flighty and vibe-forward to be read as a trans allegory in any meaningful sense, with Ortega touching on more ideas than he has either the time or inclination to explore. The movie is alternately languid and frenetic, and no less a shapeshifter than its protagonist. Its final form may not be as compelling as its first and there are a few bumps between point A and point B, but maybe a ride this strange isn’t meant to be smooth.