Martin McDonagh's 'Wild Horse Nine' earns Venice's longest ovation, reviving Oscar buzz for Malkovich

Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine," a jet-black comedy about two CIA officers unraveling on Easter Island days before Chile's 1973 military coup, received the longest standing ovation of this year's Venice International Film Festival when it premiered in the Sala Grande on Thursday night, instantly reordering expectations for the fall awards race.

The screening, part of the festival's main competition, ran to sustained applause that Deadline clocked at 14 minutes and Variety put at 13, with John Malkovich visibly emotional and embracing his co-star Sam Rockwell as the crowd continued to cheer. It was, by multiple accounts, the most enthusiastic reception of the festival's opening days, edging out the five-minute ovation for Danny Boyle's opening-night film "Ink" two nights earlier.

The numbers

"Wild Horse Nine" runs 118 minutes and was shot on location on Rapa Nui, the Chilean territory more commonly known as Easter Island, with additional filming in and around Santiago, according to the official festival program. It is one of 21 films competing for the Golden Lion, the prize that will be awarded on September 12 when the festival closes by a jury led by actor and director Maggie Gyllenhaal — a lineup detailed in a same-day dispatch from the premiere that marked the film as McDonagh's third Golden Lion bid. Early reviews have been strongly positive: the film holds an 87 percent approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and the South China Morning Post's review awarded it four out of five stars. Searchlight Pictures, which is distributing the film, has set a theatrical release date of November 6, giving the studio roughly seven weeks between the Venice launch and the start of Oscar nominations voting to build a campaign around it.

How we got here

The film marks McDonagh's third consecutive premiere in Venice's main competition, following "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" in 2017 and "The Banshees of Inisherin" in 2022, both of which went on to multiple Oscar nominations, including best picture. "Wild Horse Nine" reunites him with Rockwell and Malkovich, who plays Chris, a veteran CIA officer facing a terminal diagnosis, opposite Rockwell as Lee, his younger protégé. Steve Buscemi plays their Santiago bureau chief, who dispatches the pair to Easter Island; Parker Posey, Tom Waits, Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas round out the cast. The screenplay follows Chris's guilt over a career of covert operations as it collides with a friendship he forms with two Chilean university students, a bond that puts the men's mission, and each other, at risk just as the coup that installed Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship begins to unfold around them.

McDonagh has said he worked through several drafts before settling on the historical setting, telling the Hollywood Reporter that the choice was partly a response to how differently American and Soviet intelligence agencies tend to be scrutinized. "We know what the KGB are like but we probably don't question the CIA as much as we ought to," he said, adding that the film sits with "awful things they've done all around the world." What begins as a barbed comedy in the mode of his 2008 debut "In Bruges" shifts, in his own description, into something "much deeper and sadder" as Chris's remorse surfaces during his unlikely friendship with the students caught up in the unfolding coup.

The film arrives at a festival its own director, Alberto Barbera, has called its most political lineup in years, with several competition entries touching on war, immigration and the erosion of political freedoms, according to Hollywood Reporter's survey of this year's selections. A Cold War-era story about American covert action during a coup that installed a military dictatorship in Chile fits within that framing, even though McDonagh has largely resisted describing his own film in overtly topical terms during his Venice press appearances.

Who is affected

For Searchlight, the ovation and early reviews give the studio an anchor for a fall slate that will otherwise compete for attention against films still to premiere at Telluride and Toronto in the coming weeks. For Malkovich, 72, the reception has revived Oscar conversation around a performer nominated twice before, for "Places in the Heart" in 1985 and "In the Line of Fire" in 1994, but never a winner. Critics singled out his performance specifically: reviewing the film for Deadline, Pete Hammond called Malkovich and Rockwell "superb" in what he described as "easily one of the year's best films."

"I've been doing what I love my whole life. I plan to keep doing that," Malkovich told Variety when asked about retirement amid the fresh Oscar talk, adding of any eventual end to his career: "They will retire me when it's time."

Rockwell, who won a supporting-actor Oscar for McDonagh's "Three Billboards," and Buscemi, a longtime character actor without a competitive nomination to his name, are also drawing early notice in a crowded fall field that includes prestige entries from several other studios that have not yet screened at Telluride or Toronto. Blueprint Pictures, the British production company behind all three of McDonagh's Venice premieres, again produced through partners Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin and Anita Overland.

Trade coverage out of Venice was largely uniform in its enthusiasm. Variety's dispatch from the Sala Grande described Malkovich fighting back tears as the ovation stretched on, while the Associated Press noted the film's shift from broad comedy into a more mournful register as its central relationship deepens. Not every notice was without qualification: some reviewers flagged the film's structural echoes of "In Bruges," the two-hander comedy that first paired McDonagh's dialogue-driven style with a pair of bickering men abroad, though most treated the similarity as a deliberate return to form rather than a weakness, with the South China Morning Post's review specifically framing the new film as a return to "the joys of his first" feature.

What happens next

"Wild Horse Nine" remains in competition through the rest of the festival, which runs through September 12, when the Golden Lion and other prizes will be announced by this year's jury. Searchlight is expected to move the film through the fall festival circuit, including likely stops at Telluride and Toronto, before its November 6 theatrical opening, positioning it for a campaign through the Golden Globe, SAG and Oscar nomination periods that follow in December and January. Malkovich, for his part, indicated in Venice that he has no plans to change his approach to award-season attention regardless of how the campaign unfolds, telling reporters he has never felt "in competition" with the writers, directors and actors he has worked alongside over a four-decade career.