‘On Swift Horses’ Review: A Gorgeous Film Searching for Depth

A drama centered on the hidden queer lives of two characters who feel out of place in the traditional, conformist climate of 1950s America, this adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s novel ends up feeling more like an elegant, erotically-tinged soap opera than anything else. Beautifully shot—posed more than acted by some of its leads—and built on the simplest, most predictable oppositions imaginable, On Swift Horses wastes a theme the cinema hasn’t explored nearly enough.

Minahan, a director shaped by television—he’s helmed over fifty episodes of series like Game of Thrones, True Blood, Homeland and House of Cards, among many others—gives the film a pristine look borrowed from the Douglas Sirk–era melodramas it so clearly wants to emulate. But the similarities are only skin-deep—if that—because there’s little complexity to these characters beyond a sexual desire that, understandably, clashes with the norms of the time. Excesses aside, films like Luca Guadagnino’s Queer dug far deeper into the ambiguity and frailty of its characters. And comparisons with Todd Haynes’s Carol aren’t even fair.

Jacob Elordi—perhaps the most overrated actor of the last few years, a modelesque figure who almost always seems to be posing for a glossy magazine cover—plays Julius, a Korean War veteran who returns to his brother Lee’s home (Will Poulter). There he meets Lee’s wife, Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones of Normal People), whom he tries to seduce simply by staring at her and asking for a cigarette. She doesn’t flinch, and soon it feels like the marriage is drifting toward some sort of threesome, with or without Lee’s blessing.

Except it isn’t. Julius suddenly vanishes, heading to Reno, Nevada, in search of adventures that—as we soon discover—lean heavily toward the romantic and the sexual. Working as security in a casino, he meets Henry (Mexican actor Diego Calva, from Babylon), and the two fall into a torrid relationship accompanied by a bit of gambling mischief. Meanwhile, back in California, Muriel turns out to have quite a bit in common with her brother-in-law. Not only does she start betting on horses at the racetrack—and winning decent money—but she soon meets a young woman selling eggs and olives door to door (Colombian-American actress Sasha Calle). Suddenly Muriel discovers not only the wonders of olives but also that the young woman is attracting her in another way, mirroring Julius’s secret life.

On Swift Horses tries to build a parallel between these two discreet, equally polished lives hiding beneath the shiny traditional surface of 1950s America. While Lee throws himself into the idea of moving to what will inevitably become a classic American suburb—depressing even under the California sun—his wife and his brother quietly search for alternative paths, different ways of being. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that thematic intention, Minahan fails to shape anything formally interesting, sensitive or moving out of it.

Masters like Sirk—or, more recently, Almodóvar, Haynes or even Tom Ford in A Single Man—have used a similar polished nostalgia to tell queer stories that open into complex emotional terrain. Minahan, instead, stays trapped in a photo album: refined compositions and telegraphed emotions. Aside from a few moments in which Edgar-Jones and Poulter manage to breathe some magic into their roughly sketched characters—particularly in a late scene—the film ends up a bit like Elordi’s performance: a beautiful face staring into the distance, trying to communicate depth but ultimately offering only an elegant emptiness.