Many of McDonagh’s best cinematic efforts primarily concern themselves with male friendship dyads. Especially ones that carry the faint whiff of impending death on their proverbial clothes. Yes, In Bruges is ostensibly about two hitmen hiding out after one of them screws up and Seven Psychopaths is about the creative process and, well, psychopaths. (I trust I don’t have to clue you into the element of friendship in The Banshees of Inisherin.) But what gives them their real juice is the friendships at their center. The bonds are chaotic and constraining, finicky and frustrating. And yet, chips on the table, they endure. When death stalks us all, and it always does, that flawed connection is worth its weight in gold. And so it is in McDonagh’s latest, Wild Horse Nine.

The friends this time are Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell), CIA assassins (never let it be said that McDonagh doesn’t have other interests beyond friendship) on vacation on Easter Island. Chris is sick, morphine addicted, and obsessed with writing his memoir. Lee is doing his best to tolerate it. They encounter two Chilean students excited about their country’s recent move left, at the airport and then repeatedly on the island. The assassins can’t help but be offensive. Chris especially so, as he repeatedly tells Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alice (Ailín Salas) that it is inevitable their newly elected leftist President will be killed. Off the island, Chris’s loose lips have their chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi), nervous about his reliability, and Lee’s wife, Marge (Parker Posey), is keeping herself more occupied than Lee would like.

As with most McDonagh’s plots, it is both simple and complex all at once. It isn’t the linear story where Wild Horse Nine delights. It is the frequent wandering onto rolling hills and down blind alleys. The story is but the excuse for the storytelling, if you will.

Repeat player Sam Rockwell, like other McDonagh fave Colin Farrell, feels natural speaking McDonagh’s dialogue. His ability to hold smarm and sincerity at the same time makes him a perfect player to the writer-director. Rockwell makes the often-jagged oxymoronic pieces of McDonagh’s work snap together with ease.

Malkovich, on the other hand, trends more towards a Christopher Walken-like approach to the material. He does the script justice (more than justice, really), but he charts his own path across it. Weighing his distinctive voice down with a sense of unshakeable weariness while still keeping a scampish twinkle in his eye makes the boorish Chris a delight on-screen, a near-impossible list. It isn’t that he’s disrespecting the material. It’s that he’s finding a different frequency to vibrate at. That gives his friendship and clashes with Lee an energy that’s harder to shake, leaving the film with a surprisingly affirming melancholy that the script’s excesses might otherwise have obscured. To McDonagh’s credit, he recognizes it and lets both Rockwell and Malkovich honor the material in two different but equally correct ways.

Also to McDonagh’s credit, alongside his longtime cinematographer/collaborator Ben Davis, is the look of Wild Horse Nine. The visuals feel quite age-appropriate without lapsing into “haha, the 70s” parody, a feat in and of itself. Similarly, it captures the natural beauty of Easter Island without feeling like a travelogue. Roads are dusty and ill-kept. The rolling green hills have stomped down deadspots and patches of burnt grass. In short, it feels honest, a smart juxtaposition with the film saturated with lies, half-truths, and things left unspoken.

Chris concludes the film with two conversations, one with a Chilean and the other with his friend Lee. Simultaneously romantic and cynical, his points in both feel strangely perfect to the moment, a clarion call to never stop pushing even in times of deep despair or widespread celebration. The conclusion doesn’t give the assassins absolution or excuse their years of amoral activities. Rather, it asserts something thornier and more ambivalent, the idea that even the scumbags amongst us may deserve friendship, may have a right to change, even if only briefly.

There aren’t many filmmakers who can ground a film in the excesses of American Cold War “adventurism” and sincerely leave audiences with that message. McDonagh is one of the few. Perhaps because he sees it all through the filter of friendship, a place big enough to contain the good and the bad, the ecstatic and the horrible.

Wild Horse Nine trots into the multiplex on November 6.

Wild Horse Nine Trailer: