‘Kill The Jockey’: Venice Review

Dir: Luis Ortega. Argentina/Mexico/Spain/Denmark/US. 2024. 97mins.

It’s no kind of life. Legendary Argentinian jockey Remo (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) still has the talent to win and, in fellow jockey Abril (Ursula Corbero), a luminous, long-suffering and newly pregnant girlfriend. But his self-destructive impulses have propelled him to rock-bottom and beyond. When we first meet him, he’s stealing ketamine from his own horse. But, following a traumatic accident, Remo has the opportunity to reinvent himself – a chance he grasps, repeatedly. Like its magnetic central character, the entertaining latest from Luis Ortega is fascinating: a playful, shape-shifting, questioning journey that refuses to be neatly pinned down.

Weird and winding journey 

This is the first feature from the prolific Ortega since 2018’s El Angel, which premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard and went on to win numerous Argentine Academy awards. His debut, Caja Negro, which he directed aged just 19, enjoyed an extensive festival run and launched him as a notable Argentine directing talent. Kill The Jockey represents a step up in ambition – it’s audacious, lawless and irreverent, and carried off with supreme confidence. The picture’s distinctive sense of mischief and humour, together with Biscayart’s remarkable performance, should make this a title of interest for select arthouse distributors.

With its gangsters, heavies and a hapless fuck-up who owes money and more to the wrong people, at first glance the ingredients seem familiar enough. But the crime thriller elements are only one aspect of a film that also includes surreal flashes of fantasy and magical realism, plus a couple of lithe and sensual dance sequences. Themes of identity, gender and personal truth run through the film, but it’s a slippery thing that sidesteps making any definite and overt statements.

Biscayart, who stole the show in Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM, effortlessly slips into the skins of Remo’s various identities. At the start of the film, he’s practically brain-dead, numbed to the world by a cocktail of liquor and drugs that would fell a shire horse. Face blank behind his sunglasses, Biscayart plays the character like a puppet with tangled strings, prone to extravagant pratfalls.

Ironically, it’s a catastrophic brain injury that frees him. We get a skittish, jockey’s eye view of the moments before the incident, shot through the ears of the million-dollar racehorse that Remo’s boss Sirena (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) has unwisely entrusted to him. The injuries he sustains are “not compatible with life”, and yet Remo, head bandaged like an egg, lurches out of bed, steals a fur coat and a handbag, and wanders out onto the streets of a city half recognised, but seen with entirely new eyes. For this character incarnation, Biscayart employs a Keatonesque deadpan combined with a heavy-handed application of eye-shadow. Later, in prison following a violent crime spree, the character morphs into Lola, a soignee creature who has the ability to defy gravity and who enthrals her fellow convicts with tales of horse-lore.

Biscayart’s is not the only stand out performance. Corbero is poised and powerful as Abril, the yin to Remo’s chaotic yang (their matching black and white costumes adds to the impression that they are two sides of the same person). Like Remo, Abril embarks on her own journey of self-discovery. Elsewhere, Sirena’s hired muscle are all grim-faced men with thin-lipped horseshoe mouths and hands shaped like shovels, but it’s Cacho as Sirena who is the most unsettling. A gangster who (chillingly and inexplicably) carries a baby as an accessory, Sirena’s sentimental attachment to the troubled jockey is the kind of relationship that could turn violent at any moment.

Not everything gels and there are moments, even during the film’s lean running time, in which the energy dips. But Ortega’s smart strategy of foregrounding an eclectic score that veers between pulsing electro and upbeat Spanish language retro pop works in the film’s favour, smoothing over the bumps in this weird and winding journey.