Wild Horse Nine Ending, Explained
The Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh is back with Wild Horse Nine, another pitch black comedy about the challenges of male friendship set on a beautiful and remote island.
Unfolding during the politically tumultuous summer of 1973, the story follows two CIA operatives (played immaculately by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell) as they take a trip to see the “big heads” of Easter Island as a treat after apparently planting the seeds of Pinochet’s military coup in Chile.
As Wild Horse Nine opens in cinemas across the UK, we take a closer look at what goes down in McDonagh’s latest Oscar hopeful and sift through the tea leaves of that emotional and action-packed finale.
What Happens in Wild Horse Nine?
Wild Horse Nine is Martin McDonagh’s most overtly political movie yet. Joke for joke, it might be his funniest and most nihilistic, too.
The protagonists are two CIA fixers named Chris (Malkovich) and Lee (Rockwell) who’ve been assisting in political assassinations and government coups as America attempts to restore its influence in the wake of the Vietnam war. In the opening scene (an on-camera debrief in an office in Santiago), we see Chris list off his past missions (mostly atrocities) like a shopping list: from the 1954 coup in Guatemala to (with a wink) the Kennedy assassination. The cruel joke here is that Chile — the country they’re in, where the socialist politician Salvador Allende has just come to power by popular vote — is next in line.
With those juicy foundations laid, McDonagh moves the action to Easter Island, where Chris (who is soon revealed to be dying from cancer) has asked his partner and friend to take him so that he can see the famous heads and eventually, when the time is right, be put to rest by a bullet from Lee’s sidearm.
En route, they run into two left-wing Chilean students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), who Chris cheerily and indelicately informs that their country is about to fall apart. This turns out to be just the latest in a string of erratic behaviour from Chris that has caught the attention of their boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi), who also may have ordered Lee to do what Chris is asking him to.
Like McDonagh’s best, the movie is mostly a series of scabrously funny conversations, but the plot does lead to a big climax: when Chris starts to worry that Lee might be planning to kill him on someone else’s orders, and when he begins to suspect that the girls from the airport might not be who they say they are, he hatches a plan for one last stand.
What Goes Down in the Action-Packed Finale, and Why?
A straightforward read of this movie would be to look at it as the story of a terrible person having a late moment of clarity, but McDonagh is far too smart a writer to go for that kind of low-hanging fruit. Instead, Wild Horse Nine is a wonderfully jagged and unsentimental character study about a dying man trying to add a single grace note to his life while also going out on his own terms. The only roughly innocent character in the movie is Monica, the student who Chris rankles in the airport before attempting to flirt with in a couple of scenes. In the second of these, she disarms him by asking him to consider not lying anymore for whatever time he has left — which he takes to heart.
After that scene, Chris becomes a little protective of her — even frankly explaining what’s about to happen to people like her in Chile during the coup that’s planned in September, leaving her with one chilling piece of advice: that if it comes down to being captured or dying on the street, always take the latter option.
The last time they meet is when Chris holds her up in the back seat of her car and instructs her to drive him to a hilly spot on the island where he plans to wait for Lee and MJ (who’s just landed on the island) to show up. When they do, the second car that’s with them stops in front of Monica to arrest her, with her friend Alicia revealing herself to be a military spy. At this point, Chris takes out two soldiers with his sniper rifle, leaving Monica to run over Alicia and make it out alive — and also fully and militantly radicalised.
Wild Horse Nine Ending, Explained
That shock of action leaves us with Lee and MJ, who pull in a little further down the road. By this point, MJ has already threatened to kill Lee’s wife if he doesn’t help him to take out Chris, but when MJ dozes off abruptly in one of his drug-fueled stupors, Lee decides to take him out instead. He then walks up to see how his friend is doing.
The final scene of the movie sees Lee and Chris on the hillside, shooting the breeze one last time. They joke about never having made it to Venice and share some old war stories. They also sing a little bit of Hank Williams together. Chris then gives Lee his 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination so that he can use it as a bargaining chip for his wife’s life. At this point, he finally says the word that they agreed on for when the time is right: “Arkansas.”
After saying a brief but quite heartwrenching goodbye, Lee wipes down his weapon and places it in Chris’ hand, before breaking down and crying.
It’s a bittersweet end to one of the best of 2026 — a movie that we will be talking about for months to come.
