REVIEW: Wild Horse Nine - twisty, turny, powerful and poignant

Two prickly, quarrelling CIA agents Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are mysteriously sent from Santiago to Easter Island by their bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi) not long before the 1973 Chilean coup.

Chris, the older of the two, is also the looser of the two, carelessly saying the first and most reckless thing that comes into his head even as they pass through the airport. Lee’s role, it seems, is somehow to keep him in check even as they argue and especially as Chris’ memory gets worse and worse.

The film starts odd and vaguely alienating. But it pretty quickly starts to grip, especially when the dark reasons behind the trip start to emerge, dark reasons which get ever darker. Chris is carrying a hand-written message on a piece of paper in his pocket, reminding him not to forget that he is dying. It turns out that he has even badgered Lee into becoming complicit in whatever is going to happen.

But the wider issue is that Chris, intent on ramblingly dictating his memoirs into a Dictaphone, is complicit himself in something infinitely bigger than the playing out of their odd little bromance on an island paradise amid “the big heads”, as he calls them.

And that’s why Buscemi’s MJ is actively following events. He knows all the secrets – and that’s the very last thing that the bureau wants tumbling out. Chris’ relationship with Lee is even more complicated than it first appears. Lee is doing the bureau’s bidding…

Or is he? They bicker and they argue, but increasingly and touchingly, the very real bond between the two starts to emerge. How strong is that bond going to prove to be? Or indeed need to be?

The whole thing twists and turns – for the most part at a leisurely pace, but never less than intriguingly, the two key characters superbly drawn. Rockwell’s Lee is tried beyond all reason. His expressions at Chris’ latest faux pas are priceless. But then the stakes rise even higher when Lee’s own family are apparently at stake.

Meanwhile, Rockwell’s Lee is ever the philosopher, ever unpredictable, ever tumbling out his disjointed memoirs while stumbling across new connections – always the wild horse – especially as the pace of the whole thing picks up towards the end, with a pair of rebellious students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) thrown into the mix.

You feel you know ever less who is actually who; ever less who is controlling whom. But still it draws you in, poignantly and powerfully. It’s a film essentially where two men just chat and chat – and yet it is so much more, tackling everything from male friendship to loyalty, from life to death, from connection to loneliness.

And is if that isn’t enough, it plays out with Out Of Time, that wonderful Stones track, so perfectly picked for this. Martin McDonagh’s film is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, but its depth will be the thing that stays with us.