Wild Horse Nine' Review: Malkovich and Rockwell Turn a CIA Errand Into One of the Year's Best Two-Handers

Martin McDonagh has always been drawn to men with blood on their hands and jokes on their lips. In Wild Horse Nine, he sends two of them to the edge of the world, and the result is his most reflective film yet, one that keeps the barbed dialogue we expect from the writer-director of In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri but trades the swagger for something closer to grief.

The year is 1973. Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) are CIA officers stationed in Santiago, Chile, where the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende is on borrowed time, and both men know exactly who is holding the clock. Chris is dying. Lee is his protégé, his partner, and, if we are honest about it, his only friend. Their bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), is nervous that Chris has started talking too freely about the things the agency would rather he carry to his grave, so he ships the pair off to Easter Island on what amounts to a working farewell trip. Among the moai, with the coup ticking toward them from the mainland, Chris strikes up a bond with two idealistic leftist students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), and the trip goes sideways in ways that are both funny and quietly devastating.

What makes Wild Horse Nine work is that McDonagh understands this is a love story between two men who would never call it that. Malkovich, in his best role in years, plays Chris as a man whose contempt for the world is really contempt for himself. Every insult he lobs is a confession he cannot make directly. He is cruel, hilarious, and heartbreaking, sometimes within the same sentence, and Malkovich never asks us to forgive him. He simply lets us watch.

Rockwell is the reason that performance lands. Lee is the straight man, but Rockwell plays him with so much warmth and weariness that the role becomes the emotional spine of the film. Watch the way he absorbs Chris's verbal punches without flinching, or how his face works when he realizes the mission he has been handed may not be the one he was told about. Rockwell has been reliably excellent for two decades, and McDonagh has always known how to use him, but there is a tenderness here that feels new. This is a man who has spent his career in the shadow of a mentor and is only now wondering what he learned and what it cost.

Together they are a double act for the ages. The banter is McDonagh at full strength, profane, rhythmic, and cutting, but the silences are where the film lives. Two men on a rock in the middle of the Pacific, running out of time, unable to say the thing.

McDonagh does not let the audience forget where and when this is happening. The 1973 Chilean coup is not set dressing; it is the moral weather of the entire film. Chris and Lee are not innocents caught in history. They are history's instruments, and the film is clear-eyed about the American habit of deciding which governments get to survive. Chris's past is littered with regime changes, and the film hints at even darker chapters without ever letting him off the hook.

This is where the students matter. Monica and Alicia believe in something. They believe in Allende, in the possibility of a Chile that belongs to Chileans, and they believe it in front of two men who are quietly helping to end that possibility. The friction between the students' idealism and the agents' cynicism gives the comedy its teeth. When Chris flirts and needles and provokes them, we laugh, and then we remember what he is. For audiences who understand the long reach of U.S. intervention in Latin America, the film's refusal to soften that truth is one of its most honest choices.

Mariana di Girolamo, best known internationally for Pablo Larraín's Ema, is a delight as Monica. She is not asked to carry the film, and I wish McDonagh had given her more room, but what she does with her scenes is remarkable. She refuses to be a prop in the men's story. There is a stubbornness in her eyes when she talks politics with Chris, a sense that she knows precisely who she is speaking to, and it makes her the film's conscience. Salas is a sharp foil as the more guarded Alicia, and the two women share a chemistry that keeps the island sequences from becoming a boys' club.

Steve Buscemi, as the fidgety, thoroughly unpleasant MJ, is doing exactly what Steve Buscemi does best, and it is a pleasure every time he is on screen. And then there is Parker Posey. As Lee's wife Marge, tethered to a telephone thousands of miles away, she is in the movie for only a handful of scenes and walks away with every one of them. Kaftan-clad, loose with the truth, and spectacularly indifferent to her husband's feelings, Posey turns what could have been a plot device into a full comic portrait. She is spot on, which for Posey is simply business as usual.

Wild Horse Nine is a gorgeous film to look at. Cinematographer Ben Davis, McDonagh's longtime collaborator, shoots Easter Island like a place that has outlived every empire that ever visited it. The moai loom over these small, doomed men with total indifference, and Davis frames the wide open landscape so that Chris and Lee always look a little lost inside it. The Santiago scenes have a tighter, more anxious texture, all shadow and surveillance, which makes the island's light feel like a reprieve the characters have not earned.

Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh's work is equally stellar. Her early-1970s wardrobe is specific without ever tipping into parody: the agents' rumpled, sun-faded suits tell you everything about men who are past caring how they look, while Monica and Alicia's clothes carry the color and defiance of a generation that believed the future belonged to them. Posey's Marge, all flowing fabric and studied leisure, is a costume department joke that pays off every time she appears. Carter Burwell's score, mournful and spare, ties it together.

Wild Horse Nine is McDonagh replaying some of his favorite notes, and viewers who have grown tired of his particular brand of guilt-soaked comedy may not be converted. But the performances, and especially the partnership between Malkovich and Rockwell, elevate it beyond familiarity. It is a film about loyalty, regret, and the lies men tell themselves in service of the flag, set against a chapter of history that the United States still prefers not to discuss. It is also very, very funny.

Searchlight Pictures releases Wild Horse Nine in theaters November 6, 2026. Rated R. 118 minutes.