Dear John Malkovich, how we have missed you

Like the killer who always returns to the scene of the crime, Martin McDonagh has once again taken up the formula previously tested in In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin: two friends of different ages and a complex relationship are forced to be together in a delimited place, be it a city or an island. To admirers of the verbal cinema –full of dark humor and witty dialogue– of the Irish playwright and filmmaker, Wild horse nine offers them an almost perfect balance between repetition and variation. Chris (John Malkovich, grandiose) and Lee (Sam Rockwell, always charismatic), the typical male protagonist pair of McDonagh, are CIA agents instead of hitmen, and the context in which they move is less familiar (the Chilean Easter Island) and more concrete (1973, shortly before the military coup against Salvador Allende) than in previous works.

It is not that the director does not delve much into the political context, it simply does not seem to interest him beyond the possibilities it offers when writing provocative punchlines about the role of the CIA in bloody Latin American dictatorships or the assassination of JFK. Beyond the imperturbable moais, however, there is a difference regarding previous films that transforms everything: John Malkovich. In a role tailored to him, the veteran actor manipulates and twists McDonagh's acidic dialogues, exhibiting an eccentric and unusual verbal cadence and a gesturality that oscillates between melancholy and playful mockery. The result is a surprising performance, which always takes the path less traveled and which manages to be, at different moments, hilarious, disturbing, bitter, and moving. Perhaps McDonagh has made the same film again, but Malkovich, whom we did not know we missed so much, manages to make it look new.