Venice Review: Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine Delivers the CIA Hit

By Tom Whitfield

Martin McDonagh's fifth feature, Wild Horse Nine, premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and opens in theaters on November 6. The Film Stage's Venice review, flagged as a Critics' Pick, calls it "anything but derivative, tedious, kitschy, unfunny, or phoned-in."

That verdict matters because the marketing invited skepticism. The reviewer notes the trailer plays like a parody of McDonagh's own style, joking: "How many times did the line about killing a guy in/spelling Czechoslovakia have to play during World Cup hydration breaks before you lost it?" The film, the review argues, is exactly what is advertised — and McDonagh delivers anyway, "proving that fame and filmmaking success haven't diluted his artistry at all."

What is the film actually about?

Sam Rockwell plays Lee, the newer half of a two-man CIA team. John Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran of the agency's darkest Cold War operations: the 1954 overthrow of President Árbenz that ended Guatemala's democratic revolution, CIA work in Cuba in 1960 and the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and a work trip to Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The setting is February 1973 in Santiago, Chile, with the Pinochet-led coup already scheduled for September 11. Their destabilization work done, the pair vacation to Easter Island — Rapa Nui — where Chris, dying of cancer, has asked Lee to kill him peacefully, away from any investigating police force. Lee, the review says, is "conflicted (and devastated)" by the request. Steve Buscemi's CIA supervisor MJ adds pressure: he wants to know what happened to the rifle that killed JFK, and tells Lee to kill Chris once he gets the information.

How familiar is the territory?

Very — and the review concedes it. This is McDonagh's third film about best friends at each other's throats, after In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin. The reviewer also detects traces of Memento (Chris leaves himself notes he no longer understands, including "Don't trust Lee!") and the "Dying for Pie" episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, with its friend-carrying-a-bomb premise. Malkovich's memoir-recording CIA man echoes his Osborne Cox in Burn After Reading and his ex-CIA assassin in Wolfgang Petersen's 1993 In the Line of Fire.

The charge of self-repetition is the review's one caveat: "If there's anything to push back on, it's the well-worn territory of it all." The counter: "so long as McDonagh keeps cranking them out at this level, each one feels new."

What does the reviewer credit most?

The writing. McDonagh is "a scribe first and filmmaker second," whose direction is "merely a vehicle for what's on the page." The script is described as "part Larry David, part David Mamet, part Coen brothers, part Samuel Beckett," with riffs on democracy, cheese and sexuality, cancer-sniffing horses, and bosses shooting smack ranking "among some of McDonagh's funniest moments to date." Carter Burwell contributes a tender score, and the film carries McDonagh's recurring theological preoccupations — a Catholic church appears within minutes — in the company of Schrader, Scorsese and Bresson.

The reviewer also reads a political edge: the film treats the CIA as a joke whose reality "becomes truer by the minute," suggesting "a cold inhumanity" and self-interest guiding the agency's highest ranks.

For context, McDonagh has six Oscar nominations and one win, for his 2006 debut short Six Shooter. Whether Wild Horse Nine converts Venice's critical goodwill into awards traction will become clear after the November 6 theatrical release.