McDonagh's 'Wild Horse Nine' Turns CIA Ghosts Loose on Easter Island

Martin McDonagh has returned with another dark comedy of sharp wit and quiet melancholy, and festival audiences have greeted it as one of the year's strongest films. "Wild Horse Nine" earned standing ovations across Venice, Telluride and Toronto, where the British-Irish writer-director sat down to discuss the project.

The film casts John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA officers who helped lay the groundwork for the 1973 coup in Chile and are now travelling to Easter Island to see its Moai stone figures. Malkovich's character, Chris, is dying of cancer and growing increasingly candid about his past, including a presidential assassination.

Their exchanges carry McDonagh's signature barbed dialogue, moving between reflections on regret and mortality and absurd asides. In one scene, Chris draws a link between democracy, homosexuality and good cheese. McDonagh said he wanted the pair to come across as an old married couple.

The director traced the film's origins to a trip to Easter Island about fifteen years ago, when he hoped the setting might do for a story what Bruges did for his earlier film. Early drafts, he said, amounted to little more than two cranky men talking with no reason to be there. The CIA's activities in Chile in the 1970s gave the conversations a purpose.

McDonagh acknowledged that the characters are more cultured than the agency they represent, describing Chris as erudite, funny and capable of regret in ways he does not believe the CIA is. He said the film began to feel like a comment on the present, particularly amid recent actions by Donald Trump, though that was not its aim. History, he added, keeps repeating itself more stupidly and less secretly, and shame no longer seems to apply.

On Malkovich, McDonagh said the actor can seem ultra-dangerous, recalling that he was frightened during their first Zoom call. He praised the actor's comic dexterity and the sorrow and regret visible in his silent moments. He also credited Rockwell with a generous, understated performance that holds its own alongside Malkovich's lead.

McDonagh said the character carries a great deal of himself, including an appreciation for outrageousness and danger, and defended a scene about cheese as loving and, in its own odd way, pro-democratic. Searchlight Pictures releases "Wild Horse Nine" on November 6.