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(Review) WILD HORSE NINE: John Malkovich Makes a Monster Hard to Hate

By. Professor Horror

 

Calling WILD HORSE NINE a horror movie would be a stretch, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Writer-director Martin McDonagh, the man behind In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, has made a bickering-buddies dark comedy, and most of the festival circuit has reviewed it as one. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell lead a cast that also includes Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, and Tom Waits, so it’s easy to see why audiences walk in expecting laughs. But horror keeps turning up in the corners of this film. A death is coming that nobody can argue with, a friendship has an expiration date, and a goodbye can’t be postponed no matter how many jokes get told to stall it. Underneath all of it sits a question horror has asked since the first creature got a sympathetic close-up: can you love a monster? The film never uses that word out loud, but it definitely keeps circling it.

It’s Santiago, Chile, 1973, shortly before the US-backed coup that will end Salvador Allende’s government and drag the country into dictatorship. Two CIA agents are stationed there, Chris (Malkovich) and Lee (Rockwell), and they answer to their boss, MJ (Buscemi). Chris is the veteran of the pair, and his résumé includes Guantanamo, the Bay of Pigs, and a certain afternoon in Dallas in 1963 (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). He has spent decades keeping secrets for a living, but now he’s old, cranky, and out of fucks to give, and he has lost any sense of what he’s supposed to keep quiet, which is not ideal in a spy. Chris’s failing memory has become a concern for MJ, but Lee isn’t ready to accept how much his longtime partner has changed. When the two head to Easter Island, Lee seems determined to enjoy what time they have together rather than dwell on Chris’s declining health. They admire the wild horses, visit the island’s famous statues, and argue about practically everything, though their constant bickering reveals just how close they are. Chris also befriends two college students who bring out a surprisingly warm and playful side of him, even as their presence complicates the trip. But hanging over their time together is a difficult request Chris made before they left, one that Lee must eventually confront even as Chris’s memory deteriorates to the point that he no longer remembers asking.

That request only makes sense once you understand what Chris is facing, which is that he’s dying of cancer. The movie never lets either man forget it...even as Chris forgets almost everything else. He is reminded of his mortality constantly, while Lee has the harder job of watching his best friend come apart and knowing how it ends. That’s where the horror of the film lives. It isn’t in a creature or a killer but in an ending that approaches at its own speed, which neither man can slow down. Lee has to say goodbye to someone who may not remember the goodbye, and Chris has to meet death without all of the self he’d want to bring along. Dying also does something sneakier for the story, because the more fragile Chris becomes, the easier he is to love. A frightened old man is a hard person to judge, and the film knows exactly how much sympathy that buys him. Even the forgotten request works in his favor, since if Chris can’t remember what he asked, the weight falls on Lee.

You could hear that sympathy being built in the theater, because the laughter changed. It began as the rolling kind, fed by Chris’s total lack of filter and McDonagh’s gift for rhythm. As the film went on, it thinned into nervous, uncomfortable titters. What struck me is that Chris never changed. He kept saying the same bonkers, unfiltered things he said in the first half, in the same blunt voice, and nothing about his delivery shifted. What changed was how much we knew. With more context behind his comments, lines we’d laughed off as the ramblings of a curmudgeon started to sound like confessions, and we realized he had never been exaggerating. The room turned because the audience caught up to him, not because he moved. That’s why the comedy works as the film’s delivery system instead of a break from the darkness: every laugh built fondness, and the fondness is what makes the later reveals cost us something. By the time the movie shows us what he is, we have already grown attached, and the laughter was how the film earned our grief.

Ken Russell's THE DEVILS has considerably less patience for powerful men and the institutions that protect them. Its recent 4K restoration is a good excuse to revisit a film that understood just how much cruelty people will tolerate when it's wrapped in the right kind of authority

If you’ve watched Dexter, you’ve been here before. We know he kills, we know what he is, and we cheer for him anyway because the show has made his point of view our home. Tony Soprano did the same thing for a generation of viewers who loved a man they’d never have invited to dinner. WILD HORSE NINE does it with a weathered old spy instead of a serial killer, but the mechanism is the same, and so is the unease. We feel Lee’s sadness at losing his best friend, and we feel Chris’s fear of what’s coming, and we watch him be kind to two college students he has just met. All the while the film keeps reminding us that the man we’re grieving did something that can’t be forgiven, and it never pretends otherwise. Horror scholars have long described the monster as the return of what a culture would rather forget, and Chris fits that description perfectly, even though he’s also the guy who makes you laugh just a bit ago.

So how charming can a monster be before we stop feeling sad about their death? I don’t think the film gives a number. I think its answer is that the charm is the whole problem, because the better we like Chris, the more we have to admit about how easily affection overrides judgment. That’s also why Malkovich is so extraordinary here. He doesn’t play Chris as secretly tragic, and he never fishes for sympathy. He plays a man who is blunt, funny, and frightened, and then he lets us decide what to make of that. The performance works because it asks nothing of us, and by the end I was unsettled to find out how much I’d been willing to give anyway.

Some men can talk their way through just about anything, including the consequences of their own actions. In DIGGER, the stakes are considerably more apocalyptic, but the absurdity is just as sharp. My review looks at what happens when a man with too much power decides he gets to control the story, even as the world falls apart around him.