Wild Horse Nine

Martin McDonagh's fifth feature follows The Banshees of Inisherin, which won him Best Screenplay and Colin Farrell the Volpi Cup at Venice in 2022. Wild Horse Nine repeated half of that result: it premiered in the main competition in September 2026 and John Malkovich took the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. It is produced by Blueprint Pictures and Film4 as a UK, US and Chile co-production, and Searchlight releases it in November.

The setting is the eve of the 1973 Chilean coup, and the film takes two CIA men out of Santiago to Rapa Nui, where much of it was shot. Malkovich plays Chris, the older officer; Sam Rockwell, returning to McDonagh after Three Billboards and Seven Psychopaths, is his long-time partner Lee; Steve Buscemi is the bureau chief who sends them. Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas play the two students Chris befriends, and Tom Waits and Parker Posey appear in smaller parts. Ben Davis is the cinematographer, and Carter Burwell, who has scored every McDonagh feature, supplies the music.

Critics were largely warm — 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 79 — with the strongest praise reserved for Malkovich, whom The Hollywood Reporter called the film's real revelation. Some reviewers, Peter Bradshaw among them, found the American setting brought McDonagh back towards the harder machismo of Seven Psychopaths rather than the melancholy of Inisherin. Either way it is recognisably his: a comedy about violent men, told in dialogue that keeps swerving between the absurd and the grave.