Is Wild Horse Nine Worth Watching? Malkovich Makes the Case

Short answer first, since that is the question you typed: is Wild Horse Nine worth watching? Yes — if you go for the talking. Martin McDonagh’s new film, which opened in US theatres on 6 November 2026 through Searchlight Pictures, is a two-hour conversation between two CIA men on Easter Island, held together by a John Malkovich performance that critics keep reaching for career-best language to describe (Seat42F). Go expecting a spy thriller and you will spend the first hour checking your watch.

The setup is pure McDonagh. Santiago, 1973, months before the Chilean coup. CIA officers Chris (Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are sent by their bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi) to Rapa Nui, Easter Island (SlashFilm). Officially it is a break. Actually Chris is ill, his memory is slipping, and he keeps treating state secrets like dinner-party stories, which is a problem for an agency preparing to help overthrow a government (Seat42F). Vanyaland adds the bleaker detail: Chris has terminal cancer and wants to see the moai, the “big heads,” before he dies (Vanyaland).

It runs 1 hour 58 minutes and is rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and sexual references (Seat42F). No streaming date has been announced (Seat42F).

The John Malkovich Wild Horse Nine performance is the film

Every review lands in the same place, including the sceptical ones. The John Malkovich Wild Horse Nine performance is a patchwork of his whole career — Vanyaland calls Chris an ur-Malkovich, stitched from Burn After Reading, Of Mice and Men, In the Line of Fire and Being John Malkovich, funny, terrifying and pathetic in the same scene (Vanyaland). SlashFilm calls the film McDonagh’s most emotional and incisive work to date and gives it 9 out of 10 (SlashFilm).

What makes it work is not the ranting. It is the wobble. Seat42F notes the live question in the performance: how much Chris still knows about the effect he has on a room, since a man can lose his train of thought and still land the one remark guaranteed to make his friend squirm (Seat42F). Comic Basics makes the same point from the other side — Chris rambles, offends and blurts secrets in public, then shows real remorse almost without warning (Comic Basics).

Rockwell does the quieter, harder job. He is the minder, the listener, the man who has heard these stories often enough to know where he will have to interrupt (Seat42F). Pittsburgh’s TABLE Magazine calls the performances stellar across the board and says that if Malkovich earns an Oscar nomination for this, it will be well deserved (TABLE Magazine). The film has already picked up Gotham nominations for McDonagh’s original screenplay and for Malkovich’s lead performance (Seat42F).

A Wild Horse Nine review has to mention In Bruges

There is no way around it, so let us get it over with. Two men in a violent trade, sent to a beautiful place to wait, a boss with an ulterior motive. TABLE’s reviewer lays the two plots side by side, notes that In Bruges (2008) had hitmen in Bruges and this film has operatives on Easter Island, and calls the repetition a small but odd crime (TABLE Magazine). Vanyaland calls it a South American rework of In Bruges that works anyway (Vanyaland).

The setting does change the temperature, though. Seat42F argues the moai and open spaces make the Americans look small, and that cinematographer Ben Davis shoots the island partly in the style of Lee’s Super 8 camera, like holiday footage of a place these men have no right to feel at home in (Seat42F). SlashFilm reads the film as a sunset Western in the line of Unforgiven, with McDonagh folding spy-drama habits into a Western frame rather than breaking them (SlashFilm). Comic Basics, scoring it 8 out of 10, praises Davis’s patient eye and the wild horses and rolling hills that give the island a beauty the men barely deserve (Comic Basics).

Where this Martin McDonagh new film loses people

Three honest warnings. First, pace. Seat42F says the first half takes its time finding a rhythm, and that the film gets busier, and less interesting, once it has to deliver on the danger in its setup (Seat42F). SlashFilm is blunter about the form: it is a chamber piece first and a genre film second, dialogue-heavy, with spy-movie doublespeak and no payoff of spectacle (SlashFilm).

Second, the women get shortchanged. Comic Basics notes that Parker Posey, Tom Waits and the Chilean students all get too little to do, and that the women in particular can feel like afterthoughts (Comic Basics). Seat42F makes a related point about the students: Mariana di Girolamo’s Monica gives the film its sharpest resistance to Chris, yet the story keeps circling back to what those encounters do for him (Seat42F).

Third, the conscience question. Chris is a Catholic asking about guilt and forgiveness, and Seat42F, citing IndieWire’s Venice review, puts the doubt neatly: it is easy to believe Lee loves this man, and harder to believe Chris is ready to reckon with what he did (Seat42F). SlashFilm takes the opposite view, calling the film a brave indictment of the CIA, a slow-poison lament from a man who was instrumental in its misdeeds (SlashFilm). Both readings survive the film. That is either depth or evasion, depending on your mood.

So, is Wild Horse Nine worth watching?

Verdict: See it, in a cinema, while it is still there. As a Martin McDonagh new film it breaks no ground — every critic above says so, even the ones handing out 9s. What it offers is two actors at full stretch, jokes about cheese and the afterlife that turn into an argument about a soul, and a final stretch that hits harder than expected (Comic Basics). Skip it if you need plot machinery. Everyone else: catch it before the holiday crowd swallows the screens.

Photo: Makemake, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources

1. https://seat42f.com/wild-horse-nine-review/
2. https://www.slashfilm.com/2255960/wild-horse-nine-review/
3. https://vanyaland.com/2026/11/05/wild-horse-nine-review-another-john-malkovich-masterwork/
4. https://pittsburgh.tablemagazine.com/blog/colliers-cuts-wild-horse-nine/
5. https://www.comicbasics.com/wild-horse-nine-review-a-dying-spy-a-tape-recorder-and-a-very-strange-vacation/