The actor Daisy Edgar-Jones has a shifting, slightly elusive quality.
It’s not that she’s a chameleon, unrecognizable from role to role, nor exactly a juiceless cipher. Instead, she has the ability to resemble a variety of other performers, whether the scrappiness of Felicity Jones or fellow Daisy Ridley (wouldn’t it be easy to picture her plugged into a Star War?), the raw-nerve sensitivity of Kristen Stewart, or, as in her new movie On Swift Horses, Anne Hathaway in repressed-young-housewife mode.
Maybe it has to do with the number of times this English performer has flattened out her accent to play All-American, whether storm-chaser or marsh girl.
She’s back in the heartland for On Swift Horses as Muriel, a young Kansas woman just barely engaged to the steadfast, plan-oriented Lee (Will Poulter). We learn early on that he’s asked repeatedly, and she finally says yes on Christmas Day, in front of Lee’s brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi), who has just blown into town for the holidays.
Lee and Julius are Korean War vets, and Lee’s principal plan involves the brothers and Muriel all packing up for California. Everyone agrees, but six months later, Julius has yet to show up on the newlyweds’ doorstep. Instead, he bums around the western region of the country as an occasional gigolo and regular gambler, eventually putting down his version of roots in mid-’50s Las Vegas. (This means living in what looks like a motel, and getting a job at a casino, spotting the card-cheating techniques he understands all too well.)
Lee expects this kind of flakiness, but it quietly disappoints Muriel, who immediately shares some manner of unspoken bond with the more charismatic, laconic brother. (For extra and unnecessary emphasis, Poulter and Elordi, to put it charitably, do not resemble each other.)
Even without him actually living nearby, Julius seems to awaken something in Muriel—characters in On Swift Horses are constantly awakening something in each other, with the exception of poor old Lee. Muriel overhears horse-racing tips at her waitressing gig, and secretly starts a horse-track winning streak. Her senses seem heightened, too, noticing folks like her unmarried, short-haired, self-confident neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle). Julius, meanwhile, forges a connection with his coworker Henry (Diego Calva).
As it cuts leisurely between Julius’ and Muriel’s storylines with only a few points of direct intersection, On Swift Horses quickly resembles a hybrid of two different movie genres from the era where it takes place: a domestic melodrama, both lower-key and less subtextual than a Douglas Sirk picture; and a postwar noir, though not one quite as luridly colorful as, say, 1953’s Niagara. Sometimes this feels like an exercise—not a film-drunk homage, but an updating of a well-wrought drama from the period, with all (or, anyway, some) of the sexuality and nudity that post-Code heaven allows.
As it goes on, the movie feels a little hamstrung by what feels increasingly like a novelistic structure, appropriate because it is indeed based on Shannon Pufahl’s book of the same name. (Perhaps that’s the source of overdetermined era signifiers like desert bomb testings and the obligatory mention of the Russian dog who dies in space.) Well before the halfway mark, the sheer number of casual meetings that immediately alight with sexual charge threatens to overheat the whole enterprise. Can anyone’s arms so much as brush without inspiring lingering looks and carnal fantasies?
What keeps On Swift Horses from overripening on the vine is an ensemble that probably unintentionally takes its cues from Edgar-Jones, whose physical resemblance to Hathaway in some shots really is striking.
All five major characters are played by Young Hollywood performers still figuring out their deal. Poulter often plays variations on a goober, but he’s able to modulate that from comic to villainous to genuinely dignified, as he does here.
Elordi often seems like he’s doing an airy imitation of James Dean types, and that slightly insubstantial quality is perfect for Julius, who you may come to suspect of not having much going on, particularly in his infatuation with Henry; Diego Calva, best known as the lead of Babylon, here takes that scrappy-dreamer energy to oxygen-deprived heights. Sasha Calle was supposed to break out as Supergirl in the DCEU wreckage of The Flash; as Sandra, she gets a do-over on that tough-tender mix.
It would be easy to point to this group and bemoan the lack of a single lighting-bolt presence who jolts the whole thing to life. Instead, the main players glow with just the right amount of simmering heat; they’re starry, but not yet dominating stars. (OK, Calva’s Henry can be hard to take; his biggest plans are so moronic as to defy understanding.)
Director Daniel Minahan is a prestige-TV veteran; his credits include about 15 years of Peak HBO favorites, which means he knows how to frame a shot that doesn’t pull too much focus from his actors. He hasn’t made a great movie, but he’s given a bunch of appealing actors some practice at making a pretty good one.
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