Wild Horse Nine is a bleak, hopeless sign of the times. You’re going to love it

It is the closing sequence of Wild Horse Nine.

John Malkovich sits in the passenger’s seat of a little red car in a remote field on the remote Rapa Nui (more widely known as Easter Island). On the road ahead is a dead horse. Next to him sits the Chilean woman whose spine his gun has been pointed at for the entire ride.

The topic of conversation is how she might have thwarted an upcoming military coup in her home country. The coup that, in real life, saw the death of the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president back in 1973. 

The coup that, in the movie, Malkovich’s CIA agent Chris Carlisle has helped plan — a crowning final achievement of a blood-spattered career soon to be ended by the terminal cancer growing in his gut.

Here are the ways that could have been avoided, Carlisle says, grinning through the morbidity like a (clinically) medicated Jack Sparrow. Her country could’ve elected a leader America approved of. Or she could’ve killed every man and woman in uniform she ever laid eyes on. Or, she could’ve spent her life slaughtering every child who ever expressed the dimmest bit of enthusiasm for militarism, camaraderie and authority before they had a chance to put on a uniform.

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Unfortunately, even then she wouldn’t have been successful, Carlisle sighs — a clownishly mopey admission that’s both terrifyingly true and outlandishly funny — because no matter what she does, there will always be more of them.

“So what you do instead is find yourself a hut on a beach somewhere. Somewhere remote. Keep your back to the ocean and your eyes on the tree line. And wait there with a gun until they come for you,” Carlisle says. The joke is that none of this is funny.

“You’ll still die. But at least you’ll die with the wind in your hair.”

Rockwell and Malkovich shine

Sound pessimistic? Well, Carlisle would likely agree with you. Small in scope, grand in intention and harrowing in its honesty, Wild Horse Nine doesn’t work much as a balm for troubled times.

Instead, as it follows CIA partners Carlisle and the frantic Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) on a bucket-list vacation days before Carlisle succumbs to his disease, it functions more as a comically, cosmically bleak buddy comedy. 

And unlike movies like this year’s sunny vibe-realignment Project Hail Mary or bizarrely upbeat Michael Jackson biopic Michael, it argues against handling hopelessness with hopecore. Instead, Wild Horse Nine takes your mind off your troubles by gripping the back of your neck, pointing you down into the abyss and waiting until you laugh. 

In terms of both the buddy and comedy aspects, Rockwell and Malkovich each shine. The pairing has already generated a wave of very credible Oscar campaign buzz for the smirkingly sad-eyed Malkovich, and to a lesser extent, his hapless partner in crime, Rockwell.

A sort of chronically depressed mirror of Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe’s The Nice Guys emerges as Chesterfield begrudgingly carts Carlisle across the wreckage of his life. As he drags him through fields of impassive Moai (the Indigenous name for Easter Island’s giant heads — a fact Carlisle nearly murders a group of tourists for explaining to him). And as he ferries Carlisle into, and frantically out of, even more disastrous conversations with bewildered locals.

Carlisle, who is also suffering from a dementia-like deterioration of his memory, can’t seem to keep his mouth shut about the democratically elected prime ministers he’s killed in Africa. Or even the Democratic presidents he’s dispatched from grassy knolls in Texas.

While this sets us up for a sort of madcap comedy, it does so while assuming there’s comedy to be had in acknowledging the overwhelming futility and uncaring cruelty of being alive.

It’s a strategy that British-Irish writer/director Martin McDonagh has already employed in his other cheerfully dour titles including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Banshees of Inisherin and the iconic In Bruges.

Any passing familiarity with those largely beloved black comedies should highlight what’s in store for audiences here.

And Wild Horse Nine isn’t entirely original in its adherence to the tone of those movies. Recycle two killers on an offbeat holiday, as per In Bruges. Borrow the personal tragedy mined for defeatist, absurdist grief from Three Billboards. Shake with the odd-couple love story of Banshees. Voila: you have the formula for the charming — if somewhat suspense-free — aimlessness of Wild Horse.

Echoing a depressing theme in Hollywood

For an espionage caper, there’s little mystery: We know who will die and — pretty much to the minute — when. Think less Jason Bourne, and more JFK. 

But there’s one major difference. As Carlisle grieves for both his own vitality (“She’s life and I’m leaving it,” he explains to Chesterfield about why a woman’s kindness puts him into a tailspin) and the people whose freedom he spent his life destroying, Wild Horse Nine actually ends up far more depressing than a presidential assassination. 

It’s a theme you’d be hard-pressed to avoid while watching anything Hollywood put out this year. There was January’s dire tone-setter 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, or Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s continuation of Marvel’s newfound obsession with nihilism.

There was the fictional apocalyptic climate-comedy Digger, or the four-hour Musk documentary that “jokingly” ends with the entire planet exploding. And on the horizon, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial: the OpenAI, Sam Altman biopic about AI ending all human endeavours and purpose. It was submitted to the Golden Globes as a comedy. 

So with everything seemingly so horrible in real life, who exactly is asking directors to reflect it back to us in our escapism? If Wild Horse Nine‘s surprising success as both a comedy and overextended eulogy is to be believed, maybe it’s because there’s a certain comfort there. Maybe when staring down a metaphorical (or literal) barrel, there’s no greater sense of control than to smile back at it. 

Or maybe it’s just that misery loves company.