Martin McDonagh's first feature since The Banshees of Inisherin arrives at the 83rd Venice Film Festival with a cast that functions as its own argument: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey, assembled for a dark comedy planted at the edge of American foreign policy history.
Wild Horse Nine follows a team of CIA agents dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island in the days immediately preceding the 1973 Chilean coup. McDonagh has kept the specifics close. What he does with the premise will be answered when the film screens in competition for the Golden Lion, at a festival that director Alberto Barbera has called the most politically charged in recent memory.
The Lido is familiar ground for McDonagh. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri premiered here in 2017. The Banshees of Inisherin followed in 2022 and received nine Oscar nominations. Both arrived from Venice as awards-season front-runners. Wild Horse Nine enters the same lane.
Searchlight Pictures will release the film in theaters on November 6, 2026. It is also heading to the Toronto International Film Festival and to Zurich, where McDonagh will receive the A Tribute To... Award for his body of work.
Four years between The Banshees of Inisherin and Wild Horse Nine. The premise is the strangest McDonagh has attempted. The cast may be the best he has assembled.