Variety magazine reported that at one of the first screenings of On Swift Horses at the Palm Springs Film Festival earlier this year, “at least half a dozen people walked out, not because it’s bad but because a certain contingent of the normally open-minded art-house audience hadn’t signed up for a gay love story”. Such reactions are not so unusual still. In his remarkable memoir, It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema, Ryan Gilbey reports Andrew Haigh having had a similar experience with All of Us Strangers, when the studio invited 300 members of the public to an advance test screening. “During the first sex scene, ten people – all couples – got up and left,” Haigh tells him.
It would be easy enough for audiences to come to On Swift Horses with mistaken expectations about its orientation. After all, it stars the lovely Daisy Edgar-Jones, still idolised for her part in Normal People, the dashing Jacob Elordi, no less a heart-throb for Saltburn, and a coiffured Will Poulter, in some kind of hot love triangle, quadrangle or pentangle, in early-Fifties America? Promising.
That promise is not fulfilled. Although On Swift Horses is about a seditious subject – queer love in a repressive society – it is peculiarly earnest and programmatic. It’s an adaptation of the 2019 debut novel by Shannon Pufahl, a Stanford academic, and it remains densely written – little opened out by the script or the direction of Daniel Minahan, who has worked a lot for HBO but whose last feature film, Series 7: The Contenders, appeared in 2001.
Elordi and Poulter play brothers Julius and Lee, who are as different from each other in nature as they are physically. Both have recently finished their service in the Korean War. Lee, the patsy, has bought into the American Dream, wanting nothing more than to get married, move to California, work hard, buy a house and start a family. His younger, taller brother, Julius, is restless and reckless, a gambler and a chancer, turning tricks, borrowing money – though staying true to himself whatever the cost. Elordi, emulating James Dean’s swagger and Montgomery Clift’s tortured beauty, looks great but never quite convinces.
As the film opens, it’s Christmas in snowy Kansas. Lee is once more trying to persuade his girlfriend, Muriel (Edgar-Jones), to marry him, as well he might, when Julius rocks up. For reasons never explained, Julius – despite the season – takes off his shirt and poses invitingly on the bonnet of the truck outside. Muriel, who has just had sex with Lee, throws down a cigarette and then a light from the bedroom window. There’s immediately a complicity between them. But it’s not the simple attraction it at first seems, rather a mutual recognition that neither of them are quite as straight and dull as good old Lee. They both splendidly “see right through it all”.
The three of them plan to move to San Diego together, but Julius never turns up, heading to Las Vegas to gamble and find himself. Muriel, working as a waitress, overhears a series of infallible tips on the horses from her customers and, keeping it a secret from hubby Lee, makes a fortune betting at the races – enough to buy him the house he craves, send money surreptitiously to Julius, and give her some freedom, too.
Stopping one day to buy olives, Muriel meets her sultry, crop-haired neighbour Sandra (a striking Sasha Calle), strumming her bandurria. “I never had an olive,” says Muriel, before spitting the stone into Sandra’s hand. Soon they’re having sex, and Muriel is discovering the hidden life of an America that celebrates the atom bomb but not queerness. Likewise, Julius, working as a spotter in a casino, connects with a fellow employee: the rascally, hot Henry (Diego Calva, Manny in Babylon). They share a motel room and have lots of sex. “I’ve been in Kansas, Las Vegas and Korea and in all these places I’ve been a thief, a faggot and alone. It’s different now, because of you,” says Julius. For his part, poor Lee is left saying to Muriel that she reminds him of his brother. “I envy him sometimes – he gets to live like there’s no tomorrow.”
The film’s tagline is: “How much would you gamble for love?” Gambling is a clunky metaphor throughout for the risks and rewards of transgressive desire. Not quite as clunky as the horse, though, that Julius inexplicably turns up with one day – inexplicably, that is, until we see him riding it into the sunset in the last scene to find his lost love. The sex, by the way, is all pretty and inexplicit, so a bit of an anticlimax there too.
“On Swift Horses” is in cinemas now
[See also: Sabrina Carpenter shows us a good time]
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This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation
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