Final Rating: 3.5/5
The opening minutes of director Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses appear to set up a love triangle: Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is happy to live a country life in the Kansas home her mother worked hard to attain, and then left to her. But the man she reluctantly agrees to marry, Lee (Will Poulter), is just back from the Korean War with big California dreams.
As a woman of the 1950s, Muriel is continually expected to sublimate her own desires, or at least shift them to match those of her assigned life partner – so to California they go. But is it then no wonder that Muriel is drawn to Julius (Jacob Elordi), her husband’s brother, who continually frustrates Lee by being, as Lee puts it, “different from us.” A statement that shows Muriel just how out of touch her husband is with her inner life.
In Julius’s eyes, Muriel feels fully seen in ways that Lee is unable to even consider – but the love triangle is seemingly cut short before it even begins, and Muriel’s and Julius’s parallel stories become about themselves, not each other. Julius turns his proclivity for gambling into a career, exploring the seedier sides of Las Vegas. Muriel, meanwhile, takes more controlled risks in her journey through her understanding of her own sexuality, the world of horseracing, and her attraction to other women from the much safer bubble of California. (Not that there is no danger for Muriel as well, as a tense scene in an illegal LGBTQ bar makes clear.)
Touching base via regular phone calls, Muriel and Julius act out a complicated web of attractions and emotions that reflects reality in a way few films do. This is what drew Minahan (Fellow Travellers, Game of Thrones) to the project. Not only did he find a personal connection with tales of platonic romantic love, but he was drawn to the fullness and versatility of the story: “One of the appealing things to me about directing this film is that it evokes many film genres besides the love story – the gambling story, the domestic melodrama, the hard-boiled film noir.” (The story is adapted by writer Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 debut novel of the same name.)
The breezy screenplay and crisp, up-tempo editing sweep you along, even as the film seeks to upend expectations with understated reveals, such as an early scene where it’s revealed Julius isn’t visiting a sex worker, he is the sex worker. The plot zips by sometimes unnervingly fast, connecting two Christmases years apart, but it never overstays its 2h runtime – and the chemistry between especially Jacob Elordi and Diego Calva (as Henry), playing coworkers-turned-closeted-lovers, makes the ride well worth the time spent.
Ultimately, the film is less a cheerful navigation of a secretly unhappy marriage than an unconventional love story between two mirrors of each other, each finding a way to discover and act out their own agency in their lives in the face of existential dread, where “we’re all just a hair’s breadth from losing everything, all the time.” Credit to cinematographer Luc Montpellier for the bright lighting and saturated frames emphasizing that there is love and warmth in this picture, whatever form it takes.
Not that this is a perfect picture. The dialog sometimes feels clunky and rushed. When things turn south, the discussion can become especially wooden and on the nose. And the feature-length runtime leaves little room for the full nuance these characters and their relationships deserve. Lee especially gets the short end of the stick, begging questions like: What does he do during the day? Who or what does he think about, beyond conformity? Not to mention that the somewhat inconclusive ending will leave some scratching their head in a good way, others stamping their foot in frustration.
Still, if On Swift Horses has any central thesis, it’s the life-changing sexiness of being truly seen and accepted as you are. An ethos viewers should feel free to apply to the film itself. Come for the cast, and stay for the soul-searching questions and exploration of the many shapes love takes. Not to mention the fantastic soundtrack.
Thank you to Sony Pictures and Star PR for the screener.
