Martin McDonagh, the director you may remember from films like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, returns after a four-year break with Wild Horse Nine.
Set in 1973, as political tension in Chile reaches its peak, the film tells the story of two CIA agents. The elderly, ailing Chris and the younger Lee are sent to Easter Island on their superiors’ orders. But the stated purpose of the trip and the real mission are very different things. Lee’s actual orders are to kill Chris on the island. Chris’s illness is progressing, his memory comes and goes, and he is tormented by guilt over the things he has done in the past. Over days spent amid the island’s desolate landscape and the Moai statues, the two talk constantly, argue, and question their pasts and their loyalty to one another. Lee hesitates to carry out his orders, while Chris wants to meet his end on his own terms. Once local youths, betrayals, and mounting pressures enter the picture, things become far more complicated.
Frankly, I know very few directors in the world whose films are as worth waiting for as McDonagh’s. I know no other director who is as meticulous as a novelist who cares about every film and every line, and who respects himself and his work so much. I would even go so far as to say that no filmmaker on earth makes me feel the need to focus on every frame of a film the way Martin McDonagh does. Few directors can also make me sink so deeply into the long conversations between two people.
But I should warn you: for someone who has never seen a McDonagh film, the experience can be exhausting, even rather painful. McDonagh asks you deep and difficult questions. From a single word from his characters, or even a single glance, you can draw dozens of inferences. And he does this without handing you ready-made answers. He constantly makes you question his characters’ rights and wrongs and the limits of their morality. A character who has you roaring with laughter in one scene may make you deeply uncomfortable with what they say a few minutes later. In McDonagh’s cinema, the distance between comedy and tragedy is sometimes only a single sentence. You can clearly see traces of this in the review I wrote for his last film, The Banshees of Inisherin.
I think one of the things that makes McDonagh special is his approach to dialogue. In his films, people don’t merely talk; they test one another, belittle one another, interrogate one another, and every so often, at the most unexpected moment, show each other their most vulnerable side. And you never get the feeling that the long dialogues are written just to fill time. Even the most trivial-seeming line from a character can take on an entirely different meaning a few minutes later. For this reason, when watching his films, you have to pay attention not only to what is said but also to why the characters speak the way they do.
Moreover, in an age when everything is speeding up and people’s attention can scatter within seconds, McDonagh turns the cinema hall into something like a theater stage. In doing so, he casts a kind of spell that keeps you from looking away even for a moment. You step into the film’s atmosphere as if you were one of the characters there, and you let yourself go with the flow of the experience. To my mind, the fact that a director can demand this much sustained attention from an audience today is significant in itself. Rather than trying to keep viewers engaged through constant motion and visual spectacle, McDonagh trusts only the sentences he writes and the characters he creates.
In this respect, Wild Horse Nine doesn’t stray far from the style of filmmaking we have come to expect from the director. It explores the relationship between the two characters, what they have done in the past, and the complicated feelings they have toward each other through long conversations. The vast landscapes of Easter Island and the atmosphere created by the Moai statues add a distinct layer of meaning to these exchanges. On one side are two CIA agents who spent years meddling in other people’s lives and were involved in countless dark deeds; on the other is an island that seems very far removed from all of it. Yet even in the island’s silence, the characters cannot escape their pasts. This is exactly where McDonagh’s dark humor comes into play: he can tell of weighty matters such as death, regret, and betrayal through dialogue that sometimes leaves you doubled over with laughter.
Admittedly, McDonagh’s storytelling style may not suit everyone’s patience. Indeed, in the theater where I watched the film, two people walked out during the first act, just as Chris and Lee were visiting the Moai statues on Easter Island. Still, I don’t think that means I’m wrong. I’m sure they just had something urgent come up!
