The two CIA officers at the center of Wild Horse Nine never existed. The decade-long campaign they’re dropped into did.

Martin McDonagh’s film, which opened in U.S. theaters Nov. 6, follows Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), two Santiago-station officers sent to Easter Island “shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup,” per the film’s official synopsis. It ran in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, where Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for best actor.

The short version: the country, the coup and the CIA’s years-long push against Salvador Allende are documented history. The two agents, their bureau chief and Chris’s dictated memoir are McDonagh’s invention. The film leans on a real record, and it is careful about exactly how far.

Spoiler Warning

What follows spoils Chris’s diagnosis, the reason he wants Lee to kill him, and the Kennedy material in the film’s final scene.

What the Historical Record Documents

  1. The agency was in Chile for a decade, not a weekend. The Senate’s Church Committee reported in 1975 that “covert United States involvement in Chile in the decade between 1963 and 1973 was extensive and continuous,” aimed first at keeping Allende out of office and then at making his government fail.

  2. The money is on the public record. The U.S. spent $8 million on covert action in Chile between 1970 and the coup, including at least $1.5 million funneled to the anti-Allende daily El Mercurio.

  3. The order came from the top. Richard Helms’s handwritten notes from a Sept. 15, 1970 White House meeting record “$10,000,000 available, more if necessary”, and a few lines later, the instruction to “make the economy scream.”

  4. A coup attempt predates the one in the title. A CIA-backed kidnapping plot against Gen. René Schneider, the army commander blocking a military move against the constitution, ended with him shot dead in October 1970. The agency later paid $35,000 to the plotters and called it humanitarian assistance.

  5. The bill was counted afterward. Under Pinochet, more than 3,000 people were killed or disappeared and roughly 38,000 became political prisoners.

The trailer stays inside this window, before any of what follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqxuamKxRTo

What McDonagh Invents, and What He Won’t Show

There was no Chris, no Lee, no bureau chief named MJ. Steve Buscemi’s station chief and the two-man Santiago post are fiction built to stand in for a policy, which is roughly how the period has been described by historians anyway: a campaign run from Washington through committees and cables, not two guys on the ground calling the shots.

The film also stops short of the event in its own backdrop. The New Yorker notes that the coup that will depose Allende stays “in the offing” rather than appearing on screen, and the history it leaves out entirely is how Allende died. A 2011 forensic autopsy confirmed he died by suicide during the assault on La Moneda, with two shots from an AK-47 that Fidel Castro had given him. “We have absolutely no doubt,” the forensic team’s Francisco Etxeberria said.

The agency’s own account of the period is narrower than what the film implies by its presence. In a report declassified in 2000, a CIA spokeswoman said: “We were aware of coup plotting in 1973, but we did not instigate it.” The documented record is a decade of money, propaganda and military contacts, not a single officer giving the order on Sept. 11.

One Name on Chris’s List Doesn’t Hold Up

Chris’s dictaphone memoir runs through Guatemala, Congo, the Bay of Pigs and Dallas. Three of those four have paper trails.

The 1954 Guatemala operation, Operation PBSUCCESS, was authorized by Eisenhower in August 1953 with a $2.7 million budget, and the CIA’s own history found the assassination option was still on the table the day Jacobo Árbenz resigned. In Congo, a 1975 Senate inquiry found the CIA had plotted to kill Patrice Lumumba, though that specific plot was never carried out; Lumumba was shot by Belgian-backed Congolese forces in January 1961. IndieWire’s review has Chris close with Lumumba until the day he was executed, then standing in Dallas on a Friday afternoon in November 1963.

Dallas is where the film leaves the evidence. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that the Secret Service, the FBI and the CIA were not involved in Kennedy’s death, even while finding he was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy. McDonagh does not pretend otherwise. “I definitely think there was something going on,” he told the Guardian. “Was he the lone gunman? I don’t believe that for a second.”

Why the Real History Makes the Jokes Land Harder

McDonagh’s comedy needs the record underneath it to be true. When Chris grades his career as “Guatemala: successful. Congo: successful. Bay of Pigs: less successful,” the joke is the accounting itself, three countries graded like sales territories, one of them the Congo.

That same history makes the film’s late tenderness harder to wave off. Sight and Sound’s Jessica Kiang wrote that the agency’s role in pushing regime change in Congo and Chile is “a matter of non-fictional historical record,” which turns Chris’s guilt into an argument the audience has to have with him, not a twist to simply absorb.

McDonagh’s own reason for the setting is blunter than any reading of the film. “I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” he said at the Venice press conference.

Chris claims 68 kills across his career. Pinochet’s Chile counted thousands. That gap between one man’s ledger and a nation’s casualty count is the film’s actual subject, and it is why the funniest lines in Wild Horse Nine keep landing as something heavier than a joke.