There’s an affinity between horses and a certain kind of damaged, inarticulate manhood that has been explored by cinema since pretty much the first big-screen cowboy straddled his steed and rode off into the sunset. But the broken man breaking horses vein has been particularly rich of late, first with Chloé Zhao’s The Rider and now Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s The Mustang (with Lean on Pete cantering around the edge of the genre).
Clermont-Tonnerre’s picture, which she co-wrote with Brock Norman Brock and Mona Fastvold, is inspired by a real-life programme that allows prisoners to tame and train wild mustangs. There’s an obvious accord between the wild animals, penned for the first time in their lives, and the men locked up in the facility. It’s a parallel that is a little on the nose at times – playing the taciturn Roman, Matthias Schoenaerts is fascinated by the shed that houses the wildest beast of all, a roan with equine anger issues. And like the horse, Roman spends a lot of time locked up and thundering against the walls. But this mirroring between man and animal is an effective device, and just as Roman earns the trust of the horse, so he starts to trust himself once again, reaching out to the daughter whose childhood he missed.
Performances are strong; as Schoenaerts demonstrated with his pin-eyed rage in Bullhead, he’s a physically gifted actor who can convey as much with stillness and silence as he can with pages full of dialogue. Support comes from Connie Britton as a tough-talking prison psychologist and Bruce Dern playing Myles, a wiry tobacco-twist of a man who has spent his life working with horses.
What’s particularly striking is an inventive sound design that tunes us in and out of the blood-pounding fury in Roman’s head – a place, we soon realise, which is not somewhere that’s comfortable to linger.