Wild Horse Nine

The titles of In Bruges, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri all refer to their settings, only the first of which is a real place. It’s as though the playwright-turned-filmmaker went through a period of only trusting locations he personally conceived of to accommodate his worldview, which is grim and violent but not without a glimmer of hope. Wild Horse Nine’s setting may be his most fantastical yet: Easter Island, which is very much a real place but also remote, so suis generis, as to seem like something out of a fairytale to most of us who’ve never been there and probably never will.

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It begins 2,000 miles away in Chile, whose president Salvar Allende isn’t long for this world — not that he knows it yet. That’s according to CIA officer Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich), whose protégé Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) wishes he would keep a lower profile. With a slight tremor in his voice and a bad habit of saying things out loud to people he shouldn’t be speaking to in the first place, Lee doesn’t conduct himself in the manner you’d expect of a spy in the early 1970s. After asking two young women at the airport how they like Allende, he not-so-cryptically advises them to “enjoy him while you can.” This conversation takes place as Lee and Chris await their flight to Easter Island, where they’re traveling for pleasure, not business — they want to see “the big heads.”

That’s not all they’re doing there, of course, but the true purpose of their visit is far too juicy to mention here. What most warrants mention, early and often, is the power of Malkovich’s soulful, hilarious performance as a world-weary spy who’s seen and done far too much to have a rosy outlook. Age, experience, and perhaps even a few regrets have made Lee’s mind prone to wandering. He wonders aloud whether dinosaurs had souls and could therefore be in heaven, has an increasingly whimsical view of the wild horses roaming Easter Island, and is of the opinion that you sometimes have to do terrible things for the greater good. That might be true; it also might just be something spies who’ve participated in coups and assassinations tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

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Lee’s gruff superior (Steve Buscemi) is worried that the memoir he’s working on will make mention of Dallas, namely an assassination that took place on a grassy knoll in November 1963 and the role a certain government agency may or may not have played in it. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, JFK conspiracies and jokes about destabilizing governments would be an end unto themselves. For McDonagh, they’re a window into the soul of a man who’s only recently begun searching for it — and feeling deeply conflicted about what he’s found thus far.

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McDonagh is what you might call an actor’s director, with Rockwell and Frances McDormand earning Oscars for their performances in Three Billboards and Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan, and Kerry Condon all landing nominations for The Banshees of Inisherin. Similar attention is as inevitable as it is well earned for Wild Horse Nine’s two leads, who make the film work as both a buddy comedy and a deeply philosophical time capsule of a generation who clandestinely shaped the world as we know it today — for better and (mostly) for worse.

That might be true; it also might just be something spies who’ve participated in coups and assassinations tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

Their dynamic is funny and sad in the melancholic fashion that has become McDonagh’s signature, bearing an especially strong resemblance to his most recent film. The Banshees of Inisherin was likewise a two-hander set on a remote island focused on the complicated friendship between two men of a certain age, one of whom is considerably more cynical than the other. Lee and Chris have a brotherly affection for one another, but also a healthy distrust — they are both spies, after all, and there’s no way for either of them to know whether the other is acting on behalf of his own interests or those of their employer: “Do you ever get paranoid you’re not being paranoid enough?” Lee asks Chris at one point.

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There are actual wild horses in the film, with one in particular taking on special significance for Lee as he keeps happening upon it while driving around the island. He even writes a poem about his equine friend, though it isn’t especially good. It doesn’t need to be, though, because nearly everything else that comes out of his mouth has its own kind of poetry, albeit of a kind far more fleeting than those “big heads.”