{Fantastic Fest 2026} Wild Horse Nine (2026) No CIA Agent is An Island – Signal Horizon
Fantastic Fest always programs a couple of films that don’t strictly fit under the genre banner, and I’m always stoked when they do, because it means something like Wild Horse Nine gets a spot on the schedule. They are almost always a wonderful palatte cleaner and McDonagh does more than that. He creates a time machine to take us back to Chile during its own time of troubles. The film as a time machine allows all of us to make direct connections to our country now. Shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, two CIA agents, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), are dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island on a trust-testing mission from their bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi), and what unfolds is a dark, funny, surprisingly tender meditation on friendship, memory, and how fascism threatens to kill joy itself.
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McDonagh has always been a playwright at heart, and playwrights love an island, a contained space where characters can’t just walk away from each other. He proved that with The Banshees of Inisherin, and here he does it again, trading the Irish coast for Rapa Nui and its towering Moai statues (thats what the indigenous call the big heads), which gives the film some of its most gorgeous imagery. This is McDonagh’s second island in a row, and it clearly suits him, and is the perfect geographical space to explore isolation and lonliness and the cusp of something horrific.
The cast is incredible from top to bottom, and the chemistry between Malkovich and Rockwell carries the entire film. Rockwell’s performance is phenomenal, genuinely one of the best I’ve seen from anyone this year. Lee is sweet and authentic in a way that sneaks up on you. Malkovich is just as sharp, playing an angry, frightened man whose memory is slipping and who reluctantly lets himself be cared for because he doesn’t have much choice left. As I look at my own aging parents these are emotions that ring true for all of us. Lee’s responsibility as friend and surrogate son is to bear witness along the journey. There’s a little bit of Lennie in that performance too, whether McDonagh intended the echo of Malkovich’s own turn in Of Mice and Men or not, and it adds a haunting undertone to watching this once-sharp operative come apart at the edges. McDonagh just writes such sharp dialogue, and there’s a real tenderness between these two leads that the script never rushes past.
The film has a killer running bit about democracy leading to gayness, which leads to cheese, delivered so dryly it took me a beat to realize how funny it actually was. That’s McDonagh’s whole trick here, burying real love, real grief, and a surprising amount of kindness underneath jokes that sound like they shouldn’t work and somehow do every time. Watching Lee look after Chris as his memory fades but returns helps give the film the heart it needs so that the ending echoes with the same love the rest of the film has even if it may not be a happy ending.
There’s also a sharp, uncomfortable little thread running through the back half about how comfortably films about American intervention abroad get absorbed by exactly the political circles they’re supposed to be critiquing, very popular in conservative circles, very funny, and darkly so. McDonagh doesn’t shy away from stating plainly that the United States was neck deep in this kind of regime change work, and he lets that reality sit there without softening it. Its a ghost of the past pointing its fingers clearly into our present. Its not warning us. Its way too late for that.
The film wears its influences openly too. There’s a clear They Shoot Horses, Don’t They quality running through it, that same sense of people trapped in an reality that they haven’t created or have any power over. All of this as the world around them collapses. Enter, Tom Waits as an estranged brother, which honestly feels inevitable in hindsight, he belongs in a movie built on this kind of weathered melancholy. What struck me most, though, is where the film’s tenderness actually comes from. It’s rooted in the realization that everything gets sadder under fascism, and the slow, creeping dread of the coup closing in around these characters ends up being the biggest downer in a movie that’s otherwise stacked with jokes.
Wild Horse Nine is despite its meanness, and its BRUTAL in a few moments, an unexpectedly sweet film, one that earns its emotional gut punches by making you laugh right up until it doesn’t let you anymore. It’s not the movie I expected from this festival, but it’s exactly the kind of swing Fantastic Fest should keep making room for. It also taught me something about Arkansas.
Wild Horse Nine screened as part of Fantastic Fest, running September 17 through 24 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin. This is exactly the kind of programming that makes the festival worth attending even outside the horror slate, so don’t sleep on it. Tickets and the full schedule are at fantasticfest.com/film-guide.
Tyler has been the editor in chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. He is also the Director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University a class that pairs horror movie criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he is not watching, teaching or thinking about horror he is the Director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.