‘Wild Horse Nine’ San Sebastian Review: Martin McDonagh Turns The Allende Coup Into A Blackly Funny Tale Of Friendship And Regret

The irony and cynicism that seem to run through Martin McDonagh’s work are, in truth, alibis—poses meant to disguise what is, deep down, a soft and sensitive heart. The Irish playwright and filmmaker is a teller of moral tales that disguise themselves as anything but, built on a meticulous construction of dialogue and situations drawn from the most irreverent strain of black comedy. Like many of the characters in his earlier films, the protagonists of Wild Horse Nine are fairly unsavory —in this case, especially for political reasons— but as the minutes tick by, they will end up revealing themselves to be less cruel than they first appear. Or, at the very least, sooner or later, to have learned some kind of lesson.

One of the unsavory types on offer here is named Charlie Carlisle, played by John Malkovich in one of the finest performances of his career. The man is a veteran CIA agent who has taken part in dozens of coups and covert operations —including, it’s said, the assassination of a famous president back in 1963— and when we meet him, he’s doing much the same in Santiago, Chile, working to bring down President Salvador Allende’s government in 1973. Assisting him is a man named Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell), somewhat younger, something like his «frenemy,» a colleague he argues and bickers with constantly.

Charlie has a reputation as a bastard and a troublemaker, and tends to have difficult relationships with nearly everyone, starting with his boss on the operation, MJ (Steve Buscemi). Charlie, on top of that, has cancer and knows he doesn’t have long to live. Death itself doesn’t trouble him much, but as a religious man, he wonders whether he’ll find a place in Heaven given the nature of his life’s work. Partly to grant his dying wish of seeing Rapa Nui (or Easter Island, whichever they prefer to call it), and partly to get him out of his hair, MJ agrees to let Charlie make the trip with Lee. What the CIA would rather not happen is for Charlie to write his memoirs there, as he’s promised to do —memoirs that could reveal far too many secrets. And the agency will do whatever it takes to prevent that. Though dying, for someone as «damned» as Charlie, isn’t necessarily a problem. What does matter to him, at least in the eyes of God, is how…

Wild Horse Nine centers on what happens during that visit to the island, beginning with the very funny exchanges between the two men and continuing through the trouble Charlie gets them into by loudly announcing —to two young, university-age Allende devotees (Argentina’s Ailín Salas and Chile’s Mariana di Girolamo) they keep running into on their tour of the island— that they’ve come to destabilize the country’s democracy. But amid these misadventures and run-ins with the wild horses the title refers to McDonagh gradually assembles an intricate plot of political betrayal alongside another, more humanist one, tied to the fears and regrets of a man who has committed more sins than he can name.

Wild Horse Nine strikes a tone fairly similar to that of Slow Horses: a story of spies and counterspies who seem more concerned with cracking jokes and acting like they couldn’t care less about anything, only to reveal, in the end, that they’re far more sensitive than they let on. In that sense, Malkovich’s Charlie is a close relative of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb from that series, with which the film also shares its «horses.» Beyond their tangled geopolitics, both are stories of men who, each in his own way, are reckoning with some horrendous—or at least deeply problematic—acts they’ve committed in their lives.

McDonagh has a Tarantino-esque gift for tangential dialogue, the kind that wanders off into absurd digressions —I recommend, in particular, an argument over which countries make the best cheeses and why— only to reel those apparent detours back in at the least expected moments. And much of the film’s pleasure lies in savoring that dialogue: sharp, abrasive, and packed with wickedly funny observations. From there springs what may be the sturdiest thread running through Wild Horse Nine, one it shares (along with the landscape) with The Banshees of Inisherin: both are stories of difficult but deep friendships, the kind that weather storms and seem on the verge of breaking, yet survive (almost) anything.

The nearness of death does humanize Charlie, that’s true, but the film also takes care to note how a coup —like the one they’re about to help carry out against Allende, down to the exact date they already know— will wreck the lives and hopes of a great many people. That comes through in his encounters with the two local young women, in whose conversations something like guilt, and a certain regret, begins to surface. At the same time, McDonagh takes the opportunity to play with CIA mythology and, in particular, with a few famous assassinations that may or may not have been carried out by its operatives.

While McDonagh does tend to lean a bit too hard on the small allegories he finds lying around —from the horses of the title to the moai scattered across Rapa Nui to the moths that seem to plague them in Chile— Wild Horse Nine is a delight from start to finish: a funny, pitch-black, and highly acidic film («when we wipe out a Black president, nobody remembers his name; it’s only a scandal when we kill a white one,» Charlie will say) that lets one man annihilate his rivals while humming a Joni Mitchell song, another have marital trouble with a man who works as a clown, and the two of them wander around together, more than 50 years ago now, slowly realizing that they might just be the ones responsible for the fact that «the world has gone to shit.»