“Cavalo Selvagem Nove,” distributed by Searchlight Pictures, follows CIA agents Chris and Lee in Chile in 1973. Chris, played by John Malkovich, is the veteran of the pair; Lee, played by Sam Rockwell, is less experienced. The two are friends, though the film does not treat that bond as an obvious consequence of working together for years.
Chris’s sardonic humor, pessimism, Catholicism and love of horses often dominate the story. He also talks more than a spy should, partly because he has cancer and knows he is dying. His stories include operations and events linked to the Congo, Vietnam and Cuba, as well as the assassination of Kennedy. He claims to have killed 68 people, but his listener cannot be sure when he is telling the truth and when he is using talk as a distraction.
While in Chile, Chris tells a young woman he meets at the airport that the military will soon take power and that President Salvador Allende will be killed. The film leaves open whether this is a genuine warning or another of Chris’s calculated statements.
The story shifts in its second half, when Chris and Lee visit Easter Island and its moai statues. The film draws a connection between those sculptures and Monument Valley, the American landscape associated with John Ford’s Westerns. In this contrast, Monument Valley represents a familiar national home, while the island’s statues suggest something that remains outside American ownership and understanding.
That tension gives the film its idea of an “impossible Western”: a world in which the power to control events and images has limits. The approaching death of Chris and the predicament facing him, Lee and the CIA reinforce that sense of constraint. Lee records events with a home movie camera, while Chris carries a revealing film, but the presence of images does not dispel the story’s growing uncertainty about who is a friend and who may be an assassin.
The first half can feel overtaken by Malkovich’s forceful performance, but the film gradually builds its own shape. Its later, more melancholy sections develop the suggestion that American imperial power is not as absolute as it was in 1973, while director Martin McDonagh avoids easy cinematic solutions, the review argues.
Sources: Folha Ilustrada.