McDonagh has found a slightly different key this time, softer and more reflective without losing the acidity that makes his writing distinctive.
Martin McDonagh has always understood that the distance between a joke and a tragedy can be measured in seconds. Someone says something appalling. Somebody else responds with something even worse. You laugh, and then McDonagh quietly reveals the sadness that was sitting underneath the exchange the entire time.
Wild Horse Nine operates almost entirely inside that space. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play two CIA agents who leave 1973 Santiago for a vacation on Easter Island as Chile moves toward political upheaval. The setup sounds like the beginning of one of McDonagh’s increasingly elaborate jokes, and for long stretches it is. By the end, though, the joke has turned into something unexpectedly mournful.
That tonal evolution should feel familiar to anyone who has followed the writer-director from In Bruges through Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin. McDonagh loves men who disguise fear with insults, emotional paralysis with sarcasm and affection with behavior that would get most functioning adults punched. He returns to that territory here, but age changes the equation.
Chris Carlisle (Malkovich) is 72 and dying. Late-stage cancer is destroying his body while the early signs of dementia threaten the memories he has accumulated across decades inside the CIA. His career has carried him through some of the agency’s defining Cold War operations, and he now records those memories into a dictaphone with the detached amusement of someone reviewing an especially questionable résumé.
Malkovich is almost unnervingly well suited to the material. His natural dryness allows McDonagh’s dialogue to land without obvious effort, and his familiar irritation with the world becomes something much sadder as Chris realizes he may not have much longer to complain about it. The performance never begs for sympathy, which is precisely why it earns so much.
Sam Rockwell‘s Lee Chesterfield is Chris’ longtime partner and, more importantly, his only real friend. Rockwell has worked with McDonagh before, but the pairing with Malkovich gives him a different rhythm than his more combustible performances. Lee spends much of the movie responding to Chris rather than trying to overpower him, and Rockwell makes that patience feel like its own form of affection.
Together, they are tremendous.
The pleasure is not simply in hearing two extraordinary actors trade McDonagh dialogue. Malkovich and Rockwell make Chris and Lee feel like men who have spent decades learning exactly how far they can push each other. Their conversations drift between work, death, women, politics and whatever irritation happens to be nearby, yet the real subject is almost always the same: what happens when the person who has known you longest is suddenly running out of time?
McDonagh never needs them to say that directly. The movie is better because they do not.
The year is 1973, and Chris and Lee are stationed in Santiago as the government of Salvador Allende faces an approaching military coup. Their position as American intelligence officers places them inside a political machinery much larger than themselves. Yet Wild Horse Nine is less interested in recreating the mechanics of history than in examining what decades of proximity to power have done to the men carrying out its instructions.
Chris recounts Guatemala and Congo with unnerving casualness. The Bay of Pigs earns a slightly less enthusiastic assessment. The comedy comes from the bluntness, but McDonagh is careful about what that bluntness reveals. Chris has spent a lifetime translating history into assignments, successes and failures because that vocabulary is easier than confronting the human cost.
Now he is dying, and the language is starting to fail him.
His sudden desire to visit Easter Island initially feels almost sentimental. Chris claims he has always wanted to see the island and its famous moai before he dies. Lee agrees to accompany him for a week, and the two leave Santiago for a place so remote that the trip almost feels like stepping outside history.
Of course, McDonagh does not write vacations.
Steve Buscemi plays M.J., their deeply unpleasant handler, who has reasons to be nervous about Chris becoming less predictable. Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas play Monica and Alicia, two young Chilean women whose presence gradually complicates the agents’ getaway. Parker Posey appears as Lee’s wife, Marge, turning phone conversations about her extramarital adventures into tiny explosions of perfectly controlled indifference.
McDonagh populates the film with people who understand that Chris and Lee are not the center of the universe, even if the two men have spent much of their lives working for an institution that behaves as though it is.
That tension gives Wild Horse Nine its political bite without requiring the movie to become a history lesson. Chris and Lee belong to a generation of American men accustomed to entering other countries and treating local politics as something they have both the authority and obligation to influence. McDonagh is interested in what happens when one of those men begins recognizing how temporary his authority always was.
Chris is not transformed into a repentant saint. That would be much less interesting.
He can still be crude, dismissive and casually offensive. He mocks language he considers overly careful and treats some of the younger characters’ politics with the weary contempt of a man convinced he has already seen every ideology fail. McDonagh occasionally pushes those exchanges too hard, particularly when provocation seems to exist primarily because everyone expects a Martin McDonagh script to contain some.
But the sharper material recognizes that Chris’ certainty is becoming obsolete along with him. He knows younger people will inherit a world shaped partly by men like him, and he is not entirely proud of the condition in which they are receiving it.
That makes Malkovich’s restraint essential.
A more obviously emotional performance might have pushed Wild Horse Nine toward sentimentality. Malkovich does almost the opposite. His voice stays dry. His posture remains guarded. Even moments of confession arrive as though Chris is annoyed that dying has forced him to become introspective.
The sadness leaks through anyway.
That is where the performance becomes extraordinary. Malkovich has spent decades playing intelligence, menace, eccentricity and contempt, often all at once. Chris allows those qualities to remain while revealing the fear underneath them. He is not simply afraid of dying. He is afraid that his memory will disappear first and leave him alive without access to the person he once was.
The dictaphone becomes one of the movie’s most affecting devices because it turns memory into something Chris is desperately trying to externalize before he loses control of it. He wants to write a memoir, or at least preserve enough material that some version of himself survives. McDonagh understands the irony of a professional intelligence officer suddenly terrified by information disappearing.
Rockwell gives those scenes their necessary counterweight. Lee knows what is happening to his friend but refuses to spend the entire trip treating him as a dying man. Their teasing survives because treating Chris normally may be the kindest thing Lee can offer him.
That choice creates some of the film’s funniest exchanges and some of its saddest.
McDonagh has returned repeatedly to male friendships built around people incapable of saying what they mean. In Bruges turned guilt and loyalty into a profane buddy comedy. The Banshees of Inisherin treated the collapse of a friendship with the seriousness of a national tragedy. Wild Horse Nine feels like a quieter companion to both, concerned with what friendship looks like when there is no fight left to resolve because time has already made the decision.
Chris and Lee do not need to discover they love each other. They already know.
They simply do not have the vocabulary to say it without making fun of one another.
The Easter Island setting gives that melancholy an unexpectedly beautiful backdrop. The moai stand silently around men who have spent their careers believing human institutions are permanent. The contrast is obvious, but McDonagh does not push it too aggressively. These enormous figures have watched governments, ideologies and generations disappear while Chris frets about whether his own memories will survive another year.
Cinematically, McDonagh remains more interested in actors and dialogue than visual bravura. Yet the landscape gives Wild Horse Nine a scale his previous films rarely possessed. Sunlight, open fields, wild horses and distant ocean surround characters whose political world is growing increasingly claustrophobic.
The beauty also prevents the movie from becoming as relentlessly bitter as its subject matter could allow.
There is genuine pleasure in watching Chris experience a place he believed he might never reach. There is humor in the way his irritation survives even the majesty around him. And there is something moving about a man approaching death discovering that wonder remains available to him.
The movie becomes less successful whenever its plotting starts revealing too much machinery. McDonagh likes reversals, secrets and characters whose motivations are slightly different from what they first appeared to be. Wild Horse Nine has plenty of them, but some turns arrive with enough inevitability that the structure becomes visible before the characters acknowledge it.
The film is at its best when it stops behaving like a caper and simply lets Malkovich and Rockwell talk.
That may sound like a modest compliment for a movie involving CIA operations and the looming collapse of a government. It is not. Few filmmakers write conversations with McDonagh’s combination of rhythm, cruelty and buried affection, and few actor pairings could make those conversations feel as effortless as these two do.
Buscemi understands that rhythm immediately. His M.J. carries the exasperation of a bureaucrat who has spent years managing men who believe rules are primarily intended for other people. Posey gets less screen time but makes every appearance feel fully inhabited, turning Marge into someone who clearly has an entire movie happening somewhere else.
Di Girolamo and Salas have the more difficult task because Monica and Alicia represent a younger generation confronting men whose decisions helped shape the world they are inheriting. The screenplay does not always give them the same dimensionality afforded Chris and Lee, and the imbalance is noticeable. Still, their presence prevents the movie from becoming completely nostalgic about its aging spies.
McDonagh is not celebrating these men.
He is mourning them.
There is an important difference.
Chris and Lee can be funny, loyal and occasionally admirable without the film pretending their profession was noble by default. Wild Horse Nine allows affection for individuals to coexist with skepticism about the institutions they served. That tension is far more interesting than either outright condemnation or uncomplicated nostalgia.
It also gives the film its best late passages. Chris begins confronting the possibility that independent thought may be the only meaningful resistance people possess when institutions become larger than their consciences. His conclusions are hardly revolutionary, and McDonagh knows that. The tragedy is that Chris needed a terminal diagnosis before giving himself permission to think seriously about them.
By then, history has already started moving past him.
That is the melancholy at the center of Wild Horse Nine. Power feels permanent until suddenly it does not. Careers feel defining until they end. Political systems change, governments collapse and younger generations inherit whatever remains.
Friendship, strangely, may be one of the few things that survives long enough to matter.
Malkovich makes that realization land without ever announcing it. Rockwell gives him the perfect partner, relaxed enough to absorb Chris’ eccentricity and sharp enough to push back when necessary. Their chemistry makes the film funny for most of its runtime and makes the final stretch hurt considerably more than McDonagh initially lets on.
Wild Horse Nine does not reinvent Martin McDonagh. The profanity is here. The political discomfort is here. The miserable men saying very funny things because sincerity terrifies them are definitely here. Even some of the reversals arrive with the familiarity of a filmmaker returning to his preferred instruments.
But familiarity is not the same as exhaustion.
McDonagh has found a slightly different key this time, softer and more reflective without losing the acidity that makes his writing distinctive. The movie begins like another joke about terrible men in an improbable situation. By the end, the joke has become an elegy for the friendship keeping them human.
John Malkovich has rarely been better.
Sam Rockwell knows exactly when to let him have the room.
And Martin McDonagh once again leaves us laughing right up until the moment we realize there is something lodged in our throat.
Rating: ★★★★☆
That’s A Wrap | Wild Horse Nine
“Malkovich and Rockwell find enormous tenderness beneath the cruelty, turning a story about two aging spies into something far harder to shake”
Jonathan P. Moustakas
CREDITS
Release Date: November 6, 2026
Festival Premiere: 83rd Venice International Film Festival
Distributor: Searchlight Pictures
Writer/Director: Martin McDonagh
Cast: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Mariana Di Girolamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits, Parker Posey
Cinematography: Ben Davis
Editor: Mikkel E. G. Nielsen
Music: Carter Burwell
Runtime: 118 minutes
Rated: R
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