Martin McDonagh has taken two CIA men on holiday to the most remote inhabited island on Earth, and it has handed John Malkovich the best reviews of his late career. Wild Horse Nine, the new black comedy from the writer-director of The Banshees of Inisherin, is in theaters in the US and UK now, after winning Malkovich the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in September.
The setup is pure McDonagh. It is 1973. Chris Carlisle (Malkovich), an aging, morphine-dependent CIA veteran with a terminal diagnosis, and his protégé Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) leave their station in Santiago, Chile, for a trip to Easter Island. Chris has started dictating a memoir into a voice recorder. His boss MJ, played by Steve Buscemi, would very much like that memoir never to exist.
The real history behind the jokes
The year is not random. Chile in 1973 was months away from one of the Cold War’s defining moments. On September 11 that year, General Augusto Pinochet seized power, overthrowing Salvador Allende, the socialist president who had been democratically elected in 1970.
Washington’s role is a matter of record and long-running argument. After Allende’s election, the Nixon administration ran a covert CIA effort known as “Track II,” overseen by Henry Kissinger and CIA covert operations chief Thomas Karamessines, to find Chilean officers willing to back a coup. A CIA report released in September 2000, drawing on declassified files, concluded that the agency “probably appeared to condone” the 1973 coup while finding “no evidence” that the US took part in it, a reading some historians have disputed.
McDonagh’s script mines that shadow world. Chris’s memoir hints at a career spent near the agency’s most notorious episodes, from the 1954 coup in Guatemala to the Bay of Pigs. Early on, he jokes to two Chilean students he meets at the airport that he and Lee are CIA agents sent to destabilize their government. Nobody believes him.
Who is in it
- John Malkovich as Chris Carlisle, the dying CIA veteran
- Sam Rockwell as Lee Chesterfield, his loyal protégé
- Steve Buscemi as MJ, the bureau chief, who replaced Mark Ruffalo in the role in March 2025
- Parker Posey as Marge, Lee’s wife
- Tom Waits as Jim, Chris’s brother
- Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas as Monica and Alicia, the two students
Shot where it is set
Production began in March 2025 on Rapa Nui itself, the Chilean territory better known as Easter Island, before moving in April to Santiago, including Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport and a rayuela club in Conchalí. Filming wrapped on April 28. Ben Davis shot it, and Carter Burwell, McDonagh’s regular composer, wrote the score.
How it is doing
Critics have been warm: 94% of 233 reviews counted by Rotten Tomatoes are positive, and Metacritic scores it 77. The film opened to about $6 million domestically over the November 6 weekend and has reached roughly $14 million worldwide. For scale, that same weekend Godzilla Minus Zero opened to $31.6 million in North America. If you like your period dramas built on real newsrooms and real history, the trailer for Danny Boyle’s 1969 tabloid drama Ink is worth a look too.
Awards season is next. Malkovich is nominated for Outstanding Lead Performance and McDonagh for Best Original Screenplay at the Gotham Awards on November 30, and Burwell’s score is up at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards on November 18.
Further reading
Image: Rivi, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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