Martin McDonagh's New Film 'Wild Horse Nine' Has a Trailer and a CIA Plot That Looks Extraordinary

Martin McDonagh's new film about CIA agents in Chile before the 1973 coup has John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, and Tom Waits. Here is the trailer and why this is 2026's most anticipated film.

Martin McDonagh — the playwright and filmmaker whose specific combination of lyrical violence, black comedy, and moral ambiguity produced 'In Bruges,' 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,' and 'The Banshees of Inisherin' — has a new film arriving on November 6, 2026, and its trailer suggests a return to the specific quality of his best work.

'Wild Horse Nine' is set in Santiago, Chile, shortly before the September 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected government and brought Augusto Pinochet to power. Two CIA agents — Chris, played by John Malkovich, and Lee, played by Sam Rockwell — are dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island by their bureau chief (Steve Buscemi). On Easter Island, among the iconic moai statues, the longtime partners encounter a pair of rebellious students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas), and the intersection of their dark professional pasts and the coming coup's specific historical horror creates the film's specific dramatic space. Tom Waits and Parker Posey also star.

The casting is perfect in the specific way that McDonagh's casting has always been: Malkovich and Rockwell are exactly the right vintage and register for two men who have been doing terrible work together for too long and have reached the specific equilibrium of black comedy that prolonged moral compromise produces. Buscemi as the bureau chief adds the third dimension that the McDonagh ensemble always requires.

For the historical context: the CIA's specific involvement in the events leading to Pinochet's coup — including its support for the economic destabilisation that preceded the coup and its monitoring of the political situation — has been documented through declassified materials and is the specific historical reality that McDonagh's fiction will use as both background and protagonist pressure.

For the November release: awards season positioning, which McDonagh's films have consistently occupied. 'Wild Horse Nine' arrives exactly when Oscar conversations are forming.