The Mustang review: a ruggedly stunning tale of a convict and his horse
Dir: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Mitchell, Bruce Dern, Gideon Adlon, Connie Britton, Josh Stewart. 15 cert, 97 mins.
Belgium’s Matthias Schoenaerts tends to be a man of few words on screen. Few, and gruff. His breakthrough film, Bullhead, cast him as a burly lug in charge of a cattle farm, injecting himself with animal-growth hormones that turned him into a raging bull. In The Mustang, he is a broken man called Roman Cameron, adrift in Nevada State Prison for a violent crime, who finds his purpose by training a wild horse, as part of an organised rehab programme.
If you imagine that the film will make play with a pointed kinship between man and horse – both wild creatures, full of uncontrollable rage, that need to suppress their emotions to move forward – you’ve got the measure of it. One sequence shows them both pinned down almost symmetrically by prison guards, snorting fury into the dirt. It’s a striking image, if hardly a subtle one.
The director, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, is a former actress, best known for her collaborations with Raoul Ruiz (Time Regained), who tells a dramatically lean tale of redemption here. Her film joins Chloé Zhao’s The Rider and Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete in a burgeoning subgenre of indie pictures about masculinity and, well, horsehood. It’s even executive-produced by the old horse whisperer himself, Robert Redford, who nurtured it through Sundance.
Schoenaerts, admirably unshowy, gives us a soul-sick character on lockdown in more ways than one. He has nobody on the outside except a teenage daughter (Gideon Adlon), newly pregnant, who needs him to sign an emancipation document giving her legal autonomy. He does this with barely a second thought, telling her never to come back. But the substance of the film is all about locking heads in the corral, where Roman is first assigned to shovel horse dung, until the head of the training programme (an exacting Bruce Dern) gives him a grudging chance.
Jason Mitchell brings in some salty humour as a gregarious inmate who knows the ropes, and there’s a subplot about pilfered ketamine that brings him into conflict with Roman’s strung-out cellmate (Josh Stewart), setting up some archetypal stares across the yard and racial animus. But The Mustang lacks wrinkles or twists on its basic theme, and there’s nothing like the layered vision of prison life we get in, say, A Prophet. It’s almost debilitatingly straightforward.
Luckily, the Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens (Raw) is on hand to make the film’s visual dynamism its ace in the hole. Casting long shadows, the Nevada sun beats down here on the shiny flanks of the horses, the tanned head of Roman, and the metal that confines them both. The distant mountains and desert air beckon with an empty expanse of wilderness all around. When a sandstorm gets up at night, the oranges and blacks are spookily vivid. The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study – “Prison, with horses” – it’s ruggedly stunning.
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