Name: Wild Horse Nine
Director: Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh has world-premiered Wild Horse Nine in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, sending John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell to Easter Island as a pair of CIA officers in the weeks before the 1973 coup in Chile. It is the Irish-British writer-director’s first feature since The Banshees of Inisherin, and it arrives on the Lido as a Golden Lion contender — the same stretch of red carpet that launched his last two pictures.

That history is the story here, because Venice has never simply screened a McDonagh film; it has rewarded the writing in it. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri took the festival’s screenplay award in 2017, and The Banshees of Inisherin won it again in 2022, the year Colin Farrell also carried off the Volpi Cup for best actor. Twice the jury has singled out the words. So the question Wild Horse Nine brings to the Sala Grande is whether the words travel this far from the room.

McDonagh built his name in the theatre — the Leenane plays, The Pillowman — and his cinema has kept the theatre’s shape: two people in a confined space, talking their way toward a violence neither can talk back from. In Bruges was a two-hander in a fog of guilt; Banshees was a friendship dissolving across a kitchen table. His argument has always been miniature, verbal, cruel and funny in the same breath.

Wild Horse Nine stretches that instinct across an ocean. Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran officer; Rockwell is Lee, his protégé; Steve Buscemi is their bureau chief, MJ, who dispatches the two men from Santiago to the moai-studded emptiness of Easter Island. Parker Posey plays Lee’s wife, Marge, and Tom Waits appears as Chris’s brother. Into the mission come two students — the Chilean actress Mariana Di Girolamo and the Argentine Ailín Salas — whose encounter with Chris bends the operation off its course. The film runs 118 minutes and is a UK–US–Chile co-production.

The setting is the boldest thing about the project on paper. McDonagh has spent his career inventing places — a fictional Irish island, a made-up Missouri town, the purgatorial Bruges of his debut — and building his violence out of private grievance. Here he plants his characters inside a documented catastrophe: the months in which a US intelligence apparatus worked against the elected government of Salvador Allende, ending in the September 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet. A writer who has always kept history at arm’s length is now standing directly on top of it, and playing it, at least in part, for black comedy. That is either the most interesting move of his career or the riskiest, and the premiere is where the two possibilities meet.

The craft around him is familiar: cinematographer Ben Davis and composer Carter Burwell, both long-standing collaborators, return, and Blueprint Pictures produces with Film4. What is new is the scale. A director of chamber pieces has set a farce of Cold War tradecraft against real history — the American hand in the fall of Allende — and the tension of the premiere is exactly that mismatch: whether McDonagh’s close-quarters dialogue can hold when the room becomes a continent and the stakes are a coup.

Wild Horse Nine competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by a jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Searchlight Pictures opens the film in the United States on 6 November. Whatever the jury decides, the festival has once again handed McDonagh its most conspicuous stage — and, on past form, it will be listening hardest to what his characters say.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse Nine