Wild Horse Nine: Martin McDonagh deploys his trademark irreverence in a funny-sad 1970s spy caper

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Is Belgium gay? Are there dinosaurs in heaven? Can a single plasticky taste of American cheese immediately make you understand why the US lost the Vietnam War? Come to Martin McDonagh’s funny, ethically slippery sundowner spy caper Wild Horse Nine for answers to these and many other questions you never thought to ask. Chief among them: do performances get much better than John Malkovich playing an aging CIA operative beset by terminal cancer and early-stage dementia, too pickled in cynicism and soul-blackening state secrets to fully deserve the elegiac ending he craves?

McDonagh’s fifth feature, while similarly preoccupied with the mechanics of male friendship between an older mentor-type and his younger (though not actually young) platonic life partner, is enormously entertaining but not quite the sustained exercise in scabrous tragicomedy that The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) was. There’s more of the dubious spikiness found in his earlier, often brilliantly written but less mature movies, as he too often turns real-life tragedy into grist for a glib one-liner, and makes actual atrocities — illustrated with archive footage — serve as colourfully rancid backstory for his unreconstructed characters. In deploying his trademark machine-gun irreverence, McDonagh occasionally overshoots, and devastatingly consequential historical incidents get caught in the jokey crossfire like the unintended victims of a drive-by carried out by clowns. Which would be a bit more excusable if he didn’t always stop to reload halfway through.  

Also guilty of firing blindly at unidentified targets, Malkovich’s Chris Carlisle is a beyond-jaded CIA spook who along with his partner Lee Chesterfield (a lovely, melancholic straight-man turn from Sam Rockwell) has been posted to Santiago in 1973 to help overthrow President Salvador Allende. But Chris hasn’t the heart for it anymore, nor the head — his terminal diagnosis and intermittent forgetfulness put him more in the mood to reflect on old sins than plan new ones. And he has quite a litany of misdeeds to regret, or to refuse to. “Guatemala: successful. Congo: successful. Bay of Pigs: less successful,” he summarises succinctly, often recording such droll musings onto the dictaphone from which he will cull his memoirs. 

He has always wanted to visit Easter Island and so, taking a break from fomenting revolution and spying on activists, he and Lee go there on vacation. Wishing to end it all before the cancer takes him, but also re-embracing a degree of perimortem religiosity, Chris has asked Lee to kill him, to take advantage of a procedural loophole in the Catholic prohibition against suicide. Having double-dealt so many powerful men on his Zelig-like trail of destruction through the trouble spots of the midcentury world, Chris hopes to fool God himself. Unfortunately for Lee, who must also keep stonewalling their CIA boss MJ (Steve Buscemi, typically good value) who is especially anxious over what Chris’ memoir might reveal about the JFK assassination, Chris has entirely forgotten what he asked Lee to do.

En route to Easter Island, with Chris in full DGAF mode, spilling a lifetime of hot-button secrets to anyone in earshot, they encounter Monica (Mariana Di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), two pretty young left-wing students to whom Chris takes a shine. McDonagh, never at his best with female characters, gives them rather short shrift with Monica especially ending up little more than the appealingly idealistic vessel for Chris’ tentative redemption. 

But then the women, including Lee’s wife-back-home Marge (Parker Posey, giving excellent, caftan-clad shrew) are not the chief concern of a screenplay that is most — perhaps only — touching in its care for two guys trying to navigate a bromance so profound it’s beyond either of them to articulate. And Rockwell and Malkovich have such convincing chemistry that it buoys the movie along through its choppier waters, as does Malkovich’s chewy, salty line delivery: just lie back and luxuriate in the way he over-enunciates the “th” sound in “moths” — creatures for which, along with the wild island horses, he has developed some strange affinity. It carries the day even when Chris’s scorn is directed at distinctly anachronistic targets like the politically correct insistence on using the indigenous terms “Rapa Nui”  and “moai” to respectively refer to Easter Island and the big stone heads for which it is famous, which doesn’t seem like it would have been much of a thing in 1973. 

But McDonagh is such a fun writer of characterful, crackly dialogue that he mostly gets away with bending plausibility to fit a rhythm of his own devising. Not always, though. When Chris, contrasting the killing of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba with that of JFK sighs, “You kill one Black president and no one remembers; kill one white one and the whole world goes fucking crazy” it has the snap and clip of an epigram-shaped joke. But its is also quite fundamentally untrue if you recognise — as surely Chris must, and as Wild Horse Nine wants us to know it does — that “the whole world”  does not simply equate to “the United States of America.” 

The JFK assassination, already endlessly mythologised in the American imagination, feels like fair game for the film’s fictionalised assumption of CIA involvement. But the Agency agitating for violent regime change in both Congo and Chile is a matter of non-fictional historical record, which makes those examples sour a journey that would prefer we get off at ‘bittersweet.’ The critique of 20th century American imperialism and the depiction of the passing of the Old Guard’s Jurassic realpolitik is very welcome. But it’s sanded down by a stubborn fondness for the very worst of men, and a desire to grant their souls a peace their ilk denied so many others, “Good riddance,” says Wild Horse Nine, but also: “We’ll miss you.” 

► Wild Horse Nine is in UK cinemas 6 November.