REVIEW

‘WILD HORSE NINE’ Is Martin McDonagh’s Darkly Funny Deathbed Confession

Name: Wild Horse Nine review
Item: Wild Horse Nine
Rating: 4.3
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · November 3, 2026

‘WILD HORSE NINE’ Is Martin McDonagh’s Darkly Funny Deathbed Confession

Where to watch: In theaters November 6 (updated November 2026)Find showtimes

Chris (John Malkovich) is a CIA agent with a dying wish: visit Easter Island with his partner and closest (only) friend, Lee (Sam Rockwell). Or was it Venice, Italy? Trouble is, Chris can’t quite remember. His shuffling off this mortal coil has dislodged his memories, scattering his thoughts and casting a pall over what’s real and what’s not. That’s especially complicating when you hold a trove of America’s best-kept secrets (including key details about the Kennedy assassination) and your lips have irrevocably loosened, spilling past plots and outing yourself to just about any passerby willing to listen. This is Wild Horse Nine, writer-director Martin McDonagh’s fifth feature and among the accomplished auteur’s sharpest works: a strikingly funny, deeply poignant two-hander that balances weighty ideas about political imperialism and human mortality against a riveting actor’s showcase.

From In Bruges to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh has long been a poetic screenwriter with a darkly funny, chaotic streak. His films are riotously amusing and uncommonly dark, using comic wit to get at the tragedies lingering just beneath the human experience. Male friendship percolates through all of them, from the hapless hitmen of In Bruges to that same pairing of actors in Banshees, where one man simply decides he no longer wants to be friends with the other. Running through each is a question of trust: how men earn it, keep it, and lose it. That question carries straight over into Wild Horse Nine.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell outside a bar in Wild Horse Nine

Chris is no fool, but he’s snared deep in the clutches of his illness. We glimpse the capable operator he once was, but the man we meet is cross-eyed, with a wavering voice, and his seemingly accidental admissions of being CIA to some cute girls at the airport never quite read as a fugue state. There’s intelligence there. From the get-go, we know this is a man who can’t be allowed to keep talking like this, knowing what he knows and saying what he says. For Chris, the challenge is living with the awareness of his own forgetting: who can he trust, and how? Much like the hero of Memento, he leaves himself little clues as tokens of what he once knew, though he doesn’t always know what they mean or which way they point.

Where McDonagh’s earlier films found comedy in men fumbling toward connection, the men here are more capable than his usual characters, sharper and more competent, if hardly polished. One of them is dying, though, so he throws up his hands and says fuck it, a foil that fits McDonagh’s writing like a glove. The comedy is sharp, the pathos is real, and the film shifts gears between the two with ease. At one point, Chris tells Lee, who is always eating something, that he’s a bit cold. His evidence? He once watched Lee kill a man and decide it was perfectly fine to keep eating while he did it. It’s a laugh line with a sting, leaving Chris to wonder whether this man is capable of friendship at all, and how anyone learns to trust somebody in a place like the CIA.

Malkovich is magnificent in the lead. It takes a minute to adjust to his affected cadence, slow, withering, and deliberate, but beneath the outrageous things Chris says is a man mulling over the gamble he’s made with his soul. He wonders aloud whether a good Nazi could get into heaven, a way of weighing whether the 68 deaths at his hands guarantee him a one-way ticket to hell, or whether, as a devout Catholic, some heavenly bean counter might tally the good he’s done against the bad. Of course, a man whose life’s work involved slipping into banana republics to topple fledgling democracies and install American-backed military coups makes a tough case for himself. But that’s Chris’ résumé.

Rockwell balances him beautifully. He’s the straight man here, firing off exasperated reactions to Chris’ colorful commentary, and he plays it to a tee. Malkovich brings a weirdo, grandstanding iconoclasm; Rockwell answers with suave disaffection. Together they’re an all-time pairing, two actors whose strange energies match each other beat for beat.

The film looks gorgeous, too. Shot on location on Easter Island, it treats audiences to vistas rarely captured in a feature, and the moai erupting from the earth do double duty, standing in for Chris’ buried past while foreshadowing some of what’s to come. The supporting cast is great across the board, from Steve Buscemi as MJ, the CIA bureau chief deeply concerned about Chris’ loose lips, to Mariana di Girolamo as a Chilean student activist. Di Girolamo is composed and full of youthful passion, which rubs against Chris’ weathered, seen-it-all pragmatism, and their unlikely bond turns out to be a key that unlocks the film’s power.

It all comes to a head (pun intended) in satisfyingly writerly fashion, the forces of life and death closing in until the weasel finally pops. A running motif of wild horses roams the film like the refrain of a Rolling Stones song, signaling what it means to live freely when you’re trapped on an island. Or maybe it’s a commentary on being put out to pasture. McDonagh lets you decide.

🏆 Ranked #2 of 5 in Every Martin McDonagh Movie, Ranked →

CONCLUSION: Strikingly funny, deeply poignant, and bristling with big ideas, ‘Wild Horse Nine’ ranks among Martin McDonagh’s sharpest works, powered by an all-time pairing in John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. Like the moai staring out over Easter Island, it’s a monument to men reckoning with everything they’ve buried.

A-