Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar-Jones Stall in the Stiff Queer Drama 'On Swift Horses'

Watching gorgeous people be tormented by emotional demons is one of the great joys of going to the movies. And having them be just normal Joes and Janes while they do all that on a big screen—well that’s become an ever rarer delicacy altogether in these days of Super Joes and Ultra Janes saving the world née the universe. Sweeping period dramas seem scarcer by the year, so it’s tempting on those merits alone to embrace On Swift Horses, director Daniel Minahan’s adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel that sees gorgeous actors Jacob Elordi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Will Poulter, and Diego Calva form a foursome of intertwining affairs across 1950s California, one long sweaty post-coital limb at a time. It’s certainly a way to spend two hours!

And if those normal Joes and Janes can be gay? Well, even better! It’s a well-established fact (just because I keep saying it makes it so) that stories about straight people are DOA—been there, projected myself into that hetero-nonsense enough times, and now it’s y’all’s turn to walk in my gay ass shoes, dang it! The real dramas, the stories so far left untold (especially of the love variety) are the queer ones—sorry but that’s where the stakes are. I don’t make the rules—I just suffer under the weight of them. So if we can enjoy Jacob Elordi and Diego Calva rolling around in their tighty-whities for one hundred and nineteen minutes, haven’t we earned it? Are we not owed this much?

Somebody hold my skirts whilst I step down off this soap-box—truth be told On Swift Horses doesn’t so much earn all this colorful hullabaloo. For such a quote-unquote horny movie (there are several sex or sex-adjacent scenes in it) it’s curiously stately and somewhat inert, despite the actors doing and wearing and oft stripping out of their Sunday Best. Not to go all Aretha on it with some great-gowns-beautiful-gowns passive-aggression, but the movie (save a few instances) safely inches along the surface of things, seemingly too afraid to muss its hair and get fuck-down dirty, lest it truly scare the straights. Oh, for a whiff of rank sloppiness. Where’s Ennis’ spit-lube when you need it?

Edgar-Jones plays Muriel, whose happy-go-lucky boyfriend Lee (Poulter) has just returned from Korea and is in the process of convincing her to sell off her ancestral home in the middle of nowhere so they can up and move to the bustling suburbs-to-be of our most Western state. Or so Lee thinks! Because Muriel’s a natural born secret-keeper—in more ways than one—and she’s been heading to the race-track during her afternoon walkabouts and winning big bucks. Which allows her the freedom to say one thing while doing an entire other.

Having one eye on an exit plan is smart when you’re a queer person in 1950s America, and it’s pretty clear which way Muriel swings the second you see her up-and-down Sandra (Sasha Calle), the sultry guitar-strumming lesbian next door. But Muriel also finds herself awash in confused feelings for Lee’s brother Julius (Elordi) when they meet one fateful night before heading to California—their spark unsettles the both of them, because it turns out that Julius himself is a homo-in-hiding. (And listening to sweet Lee try to put words on what his brother is in the kindest way known to him will win you over on poor, cuckolded Lee real quick.)

And Julius, like Muriel, is also a gambler. So as Lee and Muriel head out to California we simultaneously follow Julius’ divergent path, which takes him out unto the seedy seedlings of baby Las Vegas, just then really starting to sprout up in the dusty Nevada desert. But On Swift Horses works very hard to turn gambling into a metaphor for queerness, with knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em standing in for being or not being one’s truest version of one’s self.

All of that, though? It’s a little strained. It feels kind of wedged in there to go alongside where the gambling metaphor is more successful, which is when it’s applied to the secret communications between ne’er-do-wells—lying thieving vagabond cheats, that is. And here’s where Henry (Diego Calva) drops his hat. He and Julius happen to land the same gig at a casino—the kind of place closer in scope to what you’d see in the shanty-towns of Western movies than the bright jangly megaplexes of what you’d picture today—because whaddya know: the two gay men are really good at picking up on dudes making secret eye and hand signals at one another down on the floor in service of cheating the house. Henry and Julius sniff and snitch ‘em out.

Of course those decoding skills translate to home-base for the boys too, so it takes all of ten sweaty seconds in each other’s presence before Julius and Henry are making the local hotel into their own personal fuck hut. (And once again, eternally, a shout out to Joanne Woodward for that perfect turn of phrase.) Minahan doesn’t skimp on showing these two otherworldly looking dudes en flagrante either. But as with a lot of On Swift Horses it’s more the idea of passion than passion itself? It’s a lot of posing in dusty sunlight just so and sure, it’s nice to look at. I could look at Diego & Jacob tangled up all the live long. But the film is always holding some cards back when you wish it’d just tip the damn table over. There’s a wild horse running around this story (literally) that has the right idea.

And that’s problematic because the label of “coldness” gets dropped onto a lot of queer movies where it’s not deserved—movies like Carol or Brokeback Mountain for instance, where the tension of repression itself often doesn’t always get picked up on by people who aren’t working on that wavelength. If you’re not keen on the codes of eye contact or subtle touches you’ll miss the heat throbbing just below the surface. There’s more heat in Jake Gyllenhaal not looking at Heath Ledger washing himself in Brokeback than there is in all of On Swift Horses which feels sterile to a fault, even as it has the most body-on-body contact of them all. It might just come down to a chemistry issue? I’m not sure at the end that any of these actors really have it with one another. It feels especially sparse between Edgar-Jones and Elordi, whose disorienting bond is supposed to be the heart of the film but which is never given a chance to beat. We’re told it’s there more than we are ever allowed to actually feel it.

Edgar-Jones does her part—she nails a scene where we watch her face collapse in a real-time car-ride as Muriel realizes Lee’s sussed out her sapphic inclinations, and as seen only in profile at that! So I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that, in this film anyway, it’s Elordi who’s not holding up his end of the bargain. I’ve seen him turn in a fine performance before—I thought he was a better Elvis than Austin Butler and he’s low-key diabolical in Saltburn. But his work in On Swift Horses never passes the posing stage. It’s his James Dean turn, the one every beautiful young actor must reenact, all furrowed brooding brows and cheekbones caught in the light just so. And Minahan is so (understandably) infatuated with making Elordi look pretty that Julius remains a cipher. A gorgeous cipher. A beautiful black hole sucking the entire film into itself, from whence no man, woman, swift horse or love story gay or straight or in between shall ever return.