There are films that arrive at Venice wrapped in expectation, and then there are films that seem to belong to the place from the moment the lights go down: strange, elegant, faintly haunted.

Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine is one of the latter, a film that steps into the Lido carrying the weight of history but refuses to carry it solemnly. Instead, it lets history sit at the table, pour itself a drink and tell a very bad joke.

Set in the shadow of the 1973 Chilean coup, the film follows Chris and Lee, two ageing CIA operatives played by John Malkovich (Coppa Volpi as Best Performance by a male actor) and Sam Rockwell, sent to Easter Island as the political world around them begins to fracture. What initially resembles a macabre spy comedy gradually becomes something sadder: a portrait of men discovering, perhaps too late, that the machinery of power leaves fingerprints on the soul.

McDonagh has spoken in Venice about his longstanding fascination with the CIA’s covert history and his instinct to question authority, and that impulse gives the film its particular sting. He is not interested in making a conventional political thriller, nor in turning history into a lecture; instead, he places guilt, complicity and memory inside the absurd machinery of a dark comedy. The result is recognisably McDonagh , viciously funny, exquisitely written and suddenly, almost without warning, heartbreaking.

The Easter Island setting only deepens that sensation. Against the immense, unreadable faces of the moai, Malkovich and Rockwell’s characters seem simultaneously powerful and ridiculously small, two men who have spent their lives believing they understood the world only to find themselves stranded inside its consequences. Malkovich gives Chris an unnerving mixture of authority, irritation and vulnerability, while Rockwell makes Lee restless and unpredictable, the kind of character who can make a room laugh seconds before reminding us why we should not be laughing at all. Their chemistry is the film’s beating heart, a strange friendship built from professional loyalty, buried violence and the exhaustion of men who have seen too much. Malkovich, characteristically, has resisted turning the Venice attention into a personal awards campaign, stressing instead the quality of the ensemble and McDonagh’s writing and direction. After a career spanning decades, he has also made clear that retirement is nowhere on his horizon; which, given the force he brings to this performance, feels like excellent news.

Around the pair, McDonagh assembles one of those casts that makes even a brief appearance feel consequential: Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, Mariana Di Girolamo, Ailín Salas and Tom Waits all contribute to the film’s peculiar atmosphere, somewhere between political nightmare and melancholy farce.

Di Girolamo, speaking from the perspective of a Chilean actress, has described the history at the film’s centre as something that remains painfully alive in Chile; an open wound rather than a closed chapter. That gives the film a resonance which its black humour never entirely conceals.

What lingers after the screening is not so much the plot as the feeling: the sense that McDonagh has taken a historical episode and allowed its moral aftershocks to travel across five decades until they reach the present. He did not set out to make a film about today’s geopolitics, he has said, yet the parallels have become difficult to ignore. That tension gives Wild Horse Nine its most uncomfortable quality.

The film asks what happens when secrecy becomes policy, when obedience becomes an excuse and when those who exercise power stop asking whether they should. McDonagh’s answer is not delivered as a sermon. It arrives sideways, through a joke, a pause, a look from Malkovich, a burst of Rockwell’s nervous energy. Then the laughter fades and something colder remains.

And Venice responded. The film received a thirteen-minute standing ovation after its premiere, with Malkovich visibly moved by the reception. It was the sort of response that can make a festival screening feel briefly unreal: the credits still glowing, the audience on its feet, the cast taking in the noise as though trying to work out whether it belongs to them.

Perhaps that is the most fitting response to Wild Horse Nine. It is a film about people who have spent years trying to control events from behind the curtain, only to discover that history has a way of pulling the curtain down.

Beneath the spy story, beneath the jokes and the immaculate McDonagh dialogue, there is an old and deeply human question: what does a person do with the things they cannot undo?

In Venice, surrounded by water, statues and the ghosts of countless films, McDonagh does not offer an easy answer. He offers instead a beautifully bruised one; that guilt may arrive late, that memory may refuse to die, and that sometimes the funniest man in the room is simply the one who knows how close the darkness really is.