Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lindsay Traves | Film | September 23, 2026
Casting Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin made it seem like McDonagh was making the spiritual successor to In Bruges. And while there was certainly a through line, he he’s truly done that with Wild Horse Nine, his aged-up story of a couple of killers on a quick trip to an idyllic locale. With John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as his leads, McDonagh has crafted a new tale of older men experiencing one’s end of usefulness in his job as a killer.
This duo is a pair of CIA operatives, and their story is set in the early 70s in the buildup to the Chilean couple d’etat. The two take a break between spreading American interests in democracy for a quick vacation to Easter Island where one gets tied up spilling secrets to young locals. Chris (Malkovich) is dragging Lee (Rockwell) on his little tour where he plans to have Lee assist him in ending his life. Chris is dying and wants to have control over how he goes out, which is solid timing as he has suddenly decided to write his memoirs much to the chagrin of his secretive employer. Both Chris and the pair’s CIA boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi, as bonkers as ever on his path to becoming a seasoned character actor) want Lee to kill him, but Lee feels loyalty only to one and struggles with his assignment.
Those familiar with In Bruges will understand the dilemma and drama therefrom, but this is not McDonagh reheating proverbial old nachos. Time has passed since that feature, and this story is fresh and of an old man at the end of his life who is trying to understand the morality of his actions as opposed to a young man early on who simply made an error with a gun.
Malkovich, no slouch or stranger to stellar works, gives a career defining performance as the aging operative trying to net out the red strikes in his ledger. He sustains a particular cadence and plays Chris as the irreverent loose canon able to keep up with Rockwell’s aptitude at delivering McDonagh’s snappy dialog. The writing overflows with subtext, and he delivers well on the script’s portrayal of the simmering sadness hidden behind the icy eyes of machismo.
The subtext is even more defined in McDonagh’s signature use of phone call scenes. No one weaponizes them better as a device, allowing characters to speak and act different messages as a means of creating added comedy, drama, and unsaid meaning.
McDonagh’s camera has such a reverence for his chosen locales, even if the characters don’t. Ray being bored by Bruges, Chris tiring of the “heads,” Pádraic taking his home for granted, set against gorgeous shots that could replace the works of a tourism board. If his stories seem to be set in purgatory, its further defined by him finding heavenly parts of this earth.
So is there a heaven for a killer who’s logged sixty-eight or so kills in his career? Chris hopes so, something he has only ever seemed to pay mind to now that he’s been humbled by the threat of impending death. Begrudged atonement is a common theme in these works, and Chris’s irreverence isn’t shaken even in the ramp up to his death, but his confused guilt is. He doesn’t regret all of his time as a killer (unless it’s that he thinks the death of JFK was when the earth turned to shit) but he does hope he will be welcomed into heaven. This fits with the catholic sentiments McDonagh often imbues into his tales and explains away the behavior one might otherwise call erratic. McDonagh is never the one judging his characters, he points a camera at flawed people who wonder how they might be judged by a different power.
And as much as this work sounds like poetry, it’s also grisly, fowl, and snappy. Blood and gunshot wounds are wrapped around hilarious dialog that pushes the boundaries of offensiveness. An irreverent old man in the 70s has a different vocabulary for sass and snap than a modern man, and McDonagh has a laugh unleashing that upon us.
Sometimes in chronicling Martin McDonagh’s work, it seems he’s a modern James Joyce crafting moving tales about a time in Irish history through the eyes of certain men. Aging up his earliest feature for a new perspective on his story is like the progression of “Dubliners” and maybe that makes him one of the most notable modern scribes.
Wild Horse Nine played the Toronto International Film Festival and is set to be released November 7, 2026
