Wild Horse Nine gives its Chilean characters enough presence to trouble its American protagonists, but too little room to become equally complicated people. Monica and Alicia matter to the film’s conscience. They deserve a larger share of its curiosity.

That imbalance is especially frustrating because the premise puts them in such a charged position. These young women encounter men who treat interference in their country as another working day. There is a whole film’s worth of anger, disbelief and uneasy calculation inside that encounter.

Martin McDonagh keeps his strongest emotional attention on the men doing the interfering. John Malkovich’s Chris and Sam Rockwell’s Lee get the tangled friendship and the burden of their accumulated choices. The Chilean women help expose what those choices mean. My answer is a qualified no, then. Their presence gives the story weight, while their limited independence sets a ceiling on its political insight.

Monica and Alicia Deserve Curiosity of Their Own

Monica, played by Mariana di Girolamo, and Alicia, played by Ailín Salas, are left-wing students whom Chris and Lee encounter on their journey to Rapa Nui. Their connection with Chris becomes part of his late reckoning with himself. The unevenness of that arrangement has also drawn criticism, particularly around Monica’s role in his possible redemption.

There is an immediate dramatic advantage to giving the Americans people who can answer back. An operative can make a horrible joke about a foreign country with comfortable detachment. Put someone from that country opposite him and the joke acquires a recipient. Suddenly his cleverness has somewhere ugly to land.

But answering back is only one part of being a character.

What interests me is the space around those exchanges. What do Monica and Alicia make of each other’s responses? How far would their political convictions survive a disagreement between friends? What would either woman choose to keep from Chris?

Those questions point toward the fuller film waiting at the edge of this one. A character starts to feel independent when we become interested in something she might do while the lead actor is elsewhere.

With Monica and Alicia, that interest is easier to imagine than to satisfy.

Chris Gets the Complicated End of the Conversation

The most revealing imbalance concerns who gets to understand the danger.

Chris carries privileged information about the machinery threatening Chile. His disclosures give him power even when he appears to be abandoning professional discipline. Monica and Alicia have a personal stake in the future he discusses. He has access to the men helping shape it.

That is a terrific basis for an uncomfortable scene. It also creates a trap for the writing.

Chris can become the worldly insider explaining political reality to younger idealists. His willingness to speak then becomes evidence of a surviving conscience. The women supply the urgency that makes his honesty matter.

The film’s handling of his political advice makes this concern particularly sharp. Chris lectures the students about the limits of protest and later advises Monica about resisting the ascent of authoritarian leaders. Foreign Policy

My reservation is about the authority that arrangement gives him. Having helped damage a country should make a man’s advice deeply suspect. Even useful information arrives carrying the interests and assumptions of its supplier.

I wanted more room for Monica’s judgment to complicate that exchange. She deserves the possibility of understanding something Chris cannot teach her. A lifetime spent near power can leave a person astonishingly ignorant about everyone living beneath it.

The Friendship Takes up the Oxygen

You can see the attraction of building the film around Malkovich and Rockwell. Their characters offer McDonagh a familiar dramatic engine. Two men can spend an entire conversation avoiding the thing that hurts them, then reveal it through an insult.

That kind of writing makes an audience lean closer. A small hesitation between old friends can feel more intimate than a direct confession.

The trouble comes when that intimacy determines whose suffering feels substantial.

Give the Americans the private anxieties and the emotional history, and viewers will naturally invest in them. Give the Chilean characters much of the political significance, and they risk carrying the subject while the stars carry the experience.

The distinction matters. Political conviction can tell us what a person believes. It tells us much less about how she behaves when she is embarrassed or bored, or when a friend says something she finds unforgivably stupid.

Chris gets to be morally repellent and emotionally interesting at once. Monica and Alicia would benefit from a similar freedom to be awkward, inconsistent or difficult. Their humanity should stretch beyond their usefulness as people worth feeling guilty about.

A Little Ordinary Life Would Go a Long Way

More room could mean a handful of different scenes.

A conversation between the women with its own destination would help. So would a disagreement that survives Chris’s arrival. Even a moment of private amusement at the Americans’ expense could establish a relationship that the visitors have entered halfway through.

These are small things. They change the ownership of a story.

When supporting characters have business of their own, the protagonist has to negotiate his place in their lives. That is especially valuable here. Chris belongs to an organisation accustomed to treating other people’s countries as places where it gets to make consequential decisions.

The storytelling could challenge that entitlement by allowing Monica and Alicia to withhold their attention. They could be occupied. Irritated. Interested in something he considers trivial.

There is something appealing about making a man with so many terrible secrets wait for someone to finish her own conversation.

Chile Should Leave More Than a Mark on the Americans

The 1973 setting gives every exchange with the students a pressure that exceeds the immediate scene. Their political hopes belong to a country facing catastrophe. An audience brings that knowledge into the room before Chris says a word.

That historical weight raises the stakes for characterisation. Monica and Alicia have to carry the sense of lives extending beyond the visitors’ troubled holiday.

For me, the film’s most interesting missed opportunity lies there. What happens when the Americans’ personal reckoning becomes an interruption in someone else’s much larger story?

McDonagh’s attention keeps pulling toward Chris and Lee. Their attachment remains the emotional centre, and the Chilean characters are drawn into its orbit. That choice makes sense for the friendship drama he wants to tell. It also narrows the perspective of the political drama he has chosen to invoke.

Wild Horse Nine gives Monica and Alicia importance. What I wanted was more independence. Let them make a decision whose main purpose belongs to their own lives. Let their friendship have a difficult corner we get to visit. Let Chris leave a scene while the camera stays with them.

That last possibility feels like the clearest test. When the fascinating American walks away, whose story do we still want to hear?