John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell team up for a CIA-fueled Easter Island adventure
Wild Horse Nine
Starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell & Steve Buscemi
Directed by Martin McDonough
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Nov. 6, 2026
A pair of jaded CIA operatives venture to Easter Island as part of a covert coup, on the timeline backdrop of the real-world 1973 military buildup to overthrow of Cuba’s socialist president, in this masterfully orchestrated mashup of political intrigue with buddy comedy, pathos, mysticism and musings on mortality, meddling, conspiracies and cover-ups.
Easter Island, offshore South America in the Pacific Ocean, is the famous site of the móai, the massive stone “heads” that were made from quarried island rock and considered sacred by ancient Polynesian people.
The agents are Sam Rockwell, who plays Lee, and John Malkovich as Chris, who’s older, losing his memory and dying from terminal cancer. The movie unfolds in layers as we learn why they’ve come to Easter Island, what Chris has been carrying in his satchel for a decade, how their past is creeping into their present—and why their boss (Steve Buscemi) is so focused on preventing Chris from spilling the beans about what knows and what he’s done. And, as we watch Chris continually dictating into a handheld recorder what he intends to be his memoir, he’s done a lot and he knows a lot—like the real story behind…well, you’ll find out.
Accomplished director Martin McDonogh (The Banshees of Inisherin, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Minnesota, and In Bruges) blends it all together in a terrifically engaging, tough-but-tender tale that unfolds under the stoic, silent gaze of inscrutable monolithic faces that were carved centuries ago. It’s a powerfully human saga of two friends and coworkers who’ve spent their lives in the shadows, who’ve dealt in assassinations and turbulence the world over, and who now confront another kind of change.
Chris and Lee may snipe at each other, curse at each other, and become exasperated with each other. But they’re joined together with a bond of friendship and camaraderie forged in the fires of time, one that can’t be broken.
To add another wrinkle of intrigue, they meet a couple of young, liberated women (Marina de Girolamo and Ailin Salas), who may—or may not—be on the same side of things as them. “Why do you lie all the time?” one of them asks Chris when he admits to a wild fabrication. “I’ve always done it,” he tells her. “And it’s kinda hard to stop.” And how does Lee’s wife (Parker Posey), her extramarital fling with a clown and her ransacked house play into things?
Grammy-winning singer/actor Tom Waits has a scene as Chris’ estranged brother.
Rockwell and Malkovich make a dynamite screen duo, with rhythms that bounce off each other with natural ease and a chemistry that’s almost tactile. It’s no surprise Malkovich—who’s been making movies since his Oscar-nominated breakthrough role in Places in the Heart in 1984—is an odds-favored front-runner for another Oscar nod.
The setting—the hillsides, blue skies, beaches and giant noggins of Easter Island—is intoxicating and sometimes even other-worldly. Could those wild horses really be spirit animals? Are there moths, or dinosaurs, in heaven? Does it really matter where you die?
Conspiracy theorists will appreciate how the story suggests that certain government agencies have their fingers in, well, just about everything—and how the line between good things and bad things can get blurry, and bloody.
And the Rolling Stones song that plays over the closing credits, “Out of Time,” caps it all off—in a place where time seems to stand still, like the móai, but where more than one timeline is about to run out, and huge faces made of stone take in the ever-changing ocean tides with inscrutable, unfathomable indifference.
—Neil Pond