By Gavin Mackintosh-
VENICE, ITALY — The Venice Film Festival moved into full competition mode on Thursday as two very different films — Martin McDonagh’s dark CIA comedy Wild Horse Nine and Werner Herzog’s unsettling psychological drama Bucking Fastard — premiered on the Lido, adding star power and a darker, more unpredictable tone to the 83rd edition of the world’s oldest film festival.
Both films are competing for the prestigious Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize, placing two of cinema’s most distinctive directors at the centre of an increasingly competitive race. Their arrival comes as Venice continues a programme that has combined major Hollywood names with independent cinema and films tackling subjects ranging from political power and the media to war and the human consequences of conflict.
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McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine is among the festival’s most closely watched titles. The Irish playwright and filmmaker has established a reputation for combining bleak humour with violence, moral ambiguity and sharply drawn characters, making his latest film one of the more intriguing prospects of the competition.
The film stars Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as CIA agents sent to Easter Island shortly before the military coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende in September 1973. Against that turbulent historical backdrop, McDonagh has constructed what is described as a dark comedy, placing his characters in an extraordinary setting at a moment when Cold War tensions were reaching one of their most consequential points in Latin America.
The historical setting is likely to give the film an added resonance for audiences beyond its comedy. The Chilean coup, backed by the country’s armed forces and followed by the rise of General Augusto Pinochet, ushered in a military dictatorship that lasted until 1990. Thousands of people were killed or disappeared under the regime, while many more were imprisoned, tortured or forced into exile.
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The United States’ role in Chile during the Cold War has remained the subject of intense historical debate, including over Washington’s support for opposition forces and its relationship with the Pinochet government.
McDonagh’s decision to place a CIA story in the days immediately before the coup therefore gives Wild Horse Nine a political backdrop beneath its comic surface.
The film also arrives in Venice carrying considerable awards-season expectations. McDonagh’s previous two films both premiered at the festival before becoming major Oscar contenders. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, starring Frances McDormand and Rockwell, received multiple Academy Award nominations and won Oscars for both actors. His follow-up, The Banshees of Inisherin, also premiered at Venice and went on to receive several Oscar nominations, including best picture.
That history makes Wild Horse Nine one of the films most likely to attract sustained attention from distributors, critics and awards voters as the festival progresses. A strong reception in Venice could establish the film as an important contender when the international awards season gathers pace later in the year. Thursday’s second major premiere offered an entirely different cinematic proposition.
Bucking Fastard, directed by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, stars sisters Rooney Mara and Kate Mara as twins whose extraordinarily close relationship gradually becomes an object of public fascination. The synopsis describes the sisters as speaking in unison, loving the same man and experiencing the same dreams, suggesting a story in which the boundary between individual identity and shared existence becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish.
Rumi Mara and Kate Mara act as twins in Bucking Fastard film directed by Werner Hezhog
The film is less familiar territory for audiences than McDonagh’s latest work, but Herzog’s involvement gives it immediate significance. Now one of the most recognisable figures in international cinema, Herzog has spent decades moving between fiction and documentary filmmaking, repeatedly exploring obsession, isolation, extreme environments and the limits of human behaviour.
The casting of the Mara sisters adds another unusual dimension. Their real-life sibling relationship is likely to intensify the film’s examination of twins whose physical and psychological dependence appears to have become inseparable from their public identity. Rather than offering the straightforward glamour of a conventional star vehicle, Bucking Fastard appears to fit more closely with Herzog’s long-standing interest in characters who exist on the fringes of ordinary experience.
The two premieres join an unusually varied Golden Lion competition. Among the other prominent contenders is Ink, British director Danny Boyle’s film about the rise of Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Boyle, best known internationally for films including Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, has turned to the story of one of the most powerful and controversial figures in modern media.
Also competing is NAZA, a documentary focused on the killing of civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces. Its inclusion reflects the extent to which the political turmoil of the wider world has become part of this year’s Venice programme, alongside films dealing with the situation in Iran and other contemporary conflicts.
The festival itself has also been drawn into debates over representation. Only two of the 21 films in the main competition this year were directed by women, prompting jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal to question why so few women filmmakers had been selected. She described the imbalance as part of a “systemic problem” within the film industry, particularly when it comes to financing and the kinds of stories that receive institutional support.
Against that backdrop, Thursday’s premieres demonstrated the breadth of Venice at its most ambitious: one film using the machinery of Cold War espionage as the setting for dark comedy, another exploring the disturbing intimacy of twin sisters, and a competition increasingly preoccupied with questions of power, identity, history and political violence.
It remains to be seen if Wild Horse Nine can repeat the awards success of McDonagh’s previous Venice premieres, and whether Herzog’s strange and unsettling Bucking Fastard can capture the imagination of the jury, may become two of the defining questions of this year’s Golden Lion race.
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