Wild Horse Nine Sends Two CIA Agents to Easter Island
John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell head to Easter Island on the eve of Chile’s 1973 coup in Martin McDonagh’s darkly comic new thriller Wild Horse Nine.
A CIA mission to Easter Island should at least come with a decent view. For John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, it also comes with decades of secrets, political conspiracies and several reasons to regret ever getting on the plane.
Wild Horse Nine takes place shortly before Chile’s 1973 military coup. Malkovich plays Chris and Rockwell plays Lee, longtime CIA agents dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island by their bureau chief MJ, played by Steve Buscemi.
What initially appears to be an assignment somewhere far removed from the political crisis on the mainland quickly becomes considerably more complicated. Both men are carrying the weight of their past work, while Chris forms an unexpected connection with two rebellious young students played by Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas.
The latest trailer leans into exactly the combination audiences might expect from writer-director Martin McDonagh: bleak history, uncomfortable conversations, sudden absurdity and characters who seem perfectly capable of making an already terrible situation worse.
Parker Posey also stars as Lee’s wife Marge, while Tom Waits joins an ensemble that reunites McDonagh with Rockwell after Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Coming after The Banshees of Inisherin, Wild Horse Nine gives McDonagh a very different landscape for another story about friendship, guilt and people who cannot quite escape the consequences of their choices.
Wild Horse Nine opens in UK and U.S. cinemas on November 6, 2026.
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