The file landed on my desk Friday morning, stamped with a name I trust about as far as I can throw a filing cabinet: Martin McDonagh. The man who gave us In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin has a new picture, and it's called Wild Horse Nine. Two CIA men. One long trip. A lot of talking. I sat down with it the way you sit down with a suspect who's already proven he can lie beautifully.

The Facts of the Case

It's 1973, Chile, the months before the coup, when the whole country is a powder keg with a cigarette burning toward it. John Malkovich is Chris. Sam Rockwell is Lee. They're agency men, sent on a trust-testing journey from Santiago out to Easter Island, a stretch of road and ocean long enough for two people to find out exactly how much they dislike each other. Steve Buscemi turns up as their superior, MJ, in the way Buscemi always turns up: like a bad omen in a good suit. Tom Waits and Parker Posey drift through the margins, and the supporting cast is the kind of lineup you'd be proud to pin to a corkboard.

There's a mystery in the mix, something long-buried, and Lee has a wife and kids somewhere on the far side of all this. I'll leave the rest in the evidence locker. McDonagh doesn't hand you a clean confession, and I won't spoil his.

What Works

The talk. Everything here lives and dies on the talk, and it lives. McDonagh writes dialogue like a safecracker: patient, precise, listening for the click. Malkovich and Rockwell are dynamite together. Malkovich plays Chris like a man whose weariness has been carefully ironed. Rockwell plays Lee like a pressure cooker with a smile painted on the lid. Every exchange is a duel conducted with swear words and silences, and the pauses do as much work as the punchlines.

The humor is jet black, and it earns its color. It's a comedy about men who do terrible things for an institution and then argue about sandwiches, and the film knows the joke and the horror are the same joke. Underneath the banter there's a real ache, a swan-song sadness that creeps up on you around the third act like cold coming through a floorboard.

It also looks the part. The long road from city to island gives the film room to breathe, and the landscape does what landscapes do in the best two-handers: it makes two men look small and make everything they say look smaller.

What Doesn't

Here's where I lean on the lamp and squint. The espionage plot is less a destination than an excuse. It gets the boys into the car and keeps them there, but if you came for a spy picture with a tight, ticking mechanism, you're at the wrong address. The wife-and-kids thread feels more anecdotal than essential. It's lovely when it's on screen, but you could lift it out and the case would still close. A couple of scenes run a few beats past the point where the jokes are working, the way a witness keeps talking after he's said everything useful.

And there's the matter of tone. McDonagh walks a wire between farce and tragedy, and for most of the runtime he doesn't wobble. A couple of times, though, the cruelty and the comedy knock against each other and you can hear it. Those moments are rare. They're also the only moments I'd call sloppy.

The Verdict

I've sat across from a lot of directors in this chair. Most of them lie badly. McDonagh lies like a poet, and I walked out of Wild Horse Nine grateful to have been fooled. It's not his tidiest work. The plot is a coat hanger and the real garment is two actors in a car. But what a garment. It's funny, mean, mournful, and carried by a pair of performances that deserve to be argued about over bad coffee for months.

The case is closed. The sentence: go see it, preferably with someone you can argue with on the drive home. Four out of five.