Oscar-tipped drama Wild Horse Nine sees John Malkovich play a dying CIA agent confronting the blood on his hands — and its director says the agency’s contemporary conduct makes the film feel startlingly current.
Playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh has never been one for polite conversation, and his appearance at the Venice film festival this week was no exception. Premiering Wild Horse Nine, his first feature since the 2022 tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh used the press conference platform to argue that the United States’ long history of toppling foreign governments is a story the world has been far too willing to ignore.
“I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” McDonagh told journalists. “I think maybe something that’s not talked about enough. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.”
The film arrives at a moment when such questions feel less academic than they might once have done.
A Dying Spy’s Reckoning
Wild Horse Nine is set in Santiago, Chile, on the eve of the US-backed coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president, in 1973. John Malkovich stars as Chris, a veteran CIA officer recently diagnosed with cancer and growing increasingly erratic. He is sent to Easter Island alongside his protégé Lee, played by Sam Rockwell, and the enforced stillness of the location begins to eat away at him.
As the assignment drags on, Chris starts to brood over the agency’s catalogue of interventions, from the 1954 coup in Guatemala to the 1961 assassination of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and, in the film’s version of events at least, the killing of President John F Kennedy. The Easter Island exile becomes, in effect, a long dying man’s audit of his own career.
From Corny to Chilling
McDonagh, who was born in London and holds Irish nationality, admitted that the screenplay had begun life as something quite different. He originally set out to write about a father and son who were both actors, a premise he now cheerfully concedes might have turned out “a bit corny”. The story only found its emotional centre once he tethered it to the Allende overthrow and the moral wreckage it left behind.
“I realised that the story could be about a guy who [feels] guilt and regret about the things he has done,” he explained. “It took it away from something a bit corny to somewhere much sadder and darker.”
The supporting cast is stacked with American character-actor royalty: Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey and Tom Waits all feature, while Malkovich’s central performance has already drawn early awards-season chatter.
Covert No More
The press conference turned briefly awkward when a journalist asked the cast for their reaction to the Trump administration’s reported capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January — an alleged operation that, if confirmed, would represent one of the most brazen US interventions in Latin America in half a century.
Malkovich, when pressed, offered a terse “I can’t think any more.” Rockwell stayed quiet. It was left to McDonagh to step up to the microphone and deliver the most quoted line of the day.
“I think, for me, one of the frightening things is that they don’t seem to be making it covert any more, which is very strange,” he said. “Like in the 70s, at least these horrible people had the intelligence to keep their acts secret, but it just feels like things are getting stupider and stupider and stupider.”
He was not finished. “When I wrote the film and we made it, it was to talk about 1973 and Chile at that point,” he added. “But watching it now, it does feel like it does seem to have a bit of a commentary on present day geopolitics.”
Why it Matters
Wild Horse Nine lands at a time when the gap between Hollywood historical drama and the morning’s news bulletin is narrower than it has been in decades. McDonagh’s film, whatever its merits on purely cinematic terms, arrives in Venice already freighted with a contemporary argument: that the US intelligence apparatus has operated, for generations, with a degree of impunity that cinema and journalism have rarely scrutinised with the same rigour applied to its Cold War rivals. Whether audiences — and awards voters — are ready to sit with that discomfort will shape not just the film’s reception, but the broader cultural conversation about how the country’s recent past is allowed to be told.
