Wild Horse Nine opens in U.S. theatres on Friday 6 November, and the Wild Horse Nine film is Martin McDonagh’s first feature since The Banshees of Inisherin, which earned nine Oscar nominations. Searchlight Pictures is releasing the R-rated black comedy spy thriller, which runs 1 hour 58 minutes and stars John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey.
CIA officers, Easter Island, and a farewell
Set shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, the film follows CIA officers Chris and Lee, played by Malkovich and Rockwell, who are dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island by their bureau chief MJ, played by Buscemi. Chris is a veteran battling terminal cancer, according to Pinkvilla and Cup of Soul summaries, and the trip becomes, in effect, a farewell — even as the pair wrestle with their dark pasts and present conspiracies among the island’s iconic statues.
Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas play two students Chris befriends, while Posey plays Lee’s wife Marge and Waits plays Chris’s brother. The film was shot on Rapa Nui and in Santiago, and was produced by Blueprint Pictures and Film4, according to Cup of Soul. Buscemi joined the production in March 2025, replacing Mark Ruffalo, according to Comic Basics.
Festival pedigree and critical response
Wild Horse Nine premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2026, where Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, according to Wikipedia and festival coverage. It drew a 13-minute standing ovation at Venice, according to Cup of Soul, and has since played Telluride, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival.
Critically, the film holds a 93% Tomatometer score from 120 reviews and a 76 on Metacritic, according to Comic Basics’ 3 November update — figures that indicate generally favourable reviews, though exact counts move as more reviews are added. For McDonagh, whose work pairs razor-sharp dialogue with raw emotion, the film is another test of that formula in an unlikely setting: a buddy story about guilt, friendship and mortality, staged against one of the world’s most remote landscapes, just before a real historical rupture.
