Wild Horse Nine Runs: McDonagh Knows What He's Doing
Given that McDonagh wrote In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, the answer is obvious.
Wild Horse Nine Runs: McDonagh Knows What He's Doing
There is a specific kind of confidence that Martin McDonagh operates with — the confidence of a man who has never once second-guessed a casting decision and has been right about that every single time. *Wild Horse Nine*, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, has John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, and Parker Posey in the same film, which is either the most reckless creative gamble of the awards season or the most calculated one. Given that McDonagh wrote *In Bruges* and *The Banshees of Inisherin*, the answer is obvious. The Oscars conversation has already started, and it started approximately forty-five minutes after the credits rolled.
The festival circuit this autumn is doing something interesting — it is running two conversations simultaneously. There is the glamour track: Maggie Gyllenhaal as jury president in Venice, stepping through the same red carpet she walked as a first-time director, the whole arc of a career compressed into a single image. And then there is the substance track, which is where *Wild Horse Nine* lives, where *A Common Story* lives, where Anna Foglietta steps behind the camera after years in front of it and makes something quiet and honest with Alba Rohrwacher. The two tracks don't always meet. This year, they might.
*La Bola Negra* on Netflix is the other name worth holding. A gay period epic co-directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo — known collectively as Los Javis — who spent thirteen years as romantic partners before the relationship ended and decided that the most logical response was to keep making films together anyway. The film survived the breakup. It survived the production. It is now being described as an Oscar frontrunner, which is either a miracle or proof that the best work sometimes comes from the most uncomfortable places.
Meanwhile, at Telluride, the mudslides tried to steal the programme and failed. Andrew Scott is there. Julianne Moore is there. The festival goes on, as it always does, because the films don't care about the weather.
And somewhere in a Marvel editing suite, Joe Russo is apparently still figuring out what *Avengers: Doomsday* is actually about — improvising scenes on set, relying on rehearsals, working without a finished script on a film that is supposed to close out the Multiverse Saga. The most expensive improv exercise in cinema history opens in December.
The Venice jury has seen the real work. The rest of us are still waiting.
