Venice 2024 review: To Kill a Mongolian Horse (Xiaoxuan Jiang)

“A loving but hard-hitting ode to those people adrift in a world that they find hostile and confusing, and a bold testament to their resilience.”

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a fascinating shift to films that combine traits of the traditional Western with more contemporary sensibilities, looking at the lingering specter of the American West through modern perspectives. These films usually tend to be sharp social critiques that interrogate, rather than celebrate, the traditions embedded in these stories. One of the more interesting developments is the number of these films that are directed by women, a fascinating shift for a genre that has mostly been viewed as the dominion of heteronormative and patriarchal values. Chloé Zhao’s The Rider and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog are two notable examples of this trend, and we now add another in the form of To Kill a Mongolian Horse, written and directed by Xiaoxuan Jiang in her directorial debut, and a truly impressive introduction to her work. Rather than looking at the American West directly in terms of locale and culture, she locates the story within her native Inner Mongolia. The region is technically part of China but has its own vibrant culture that the director seeks to explore with this film, which focuses on the trials and tribulations of an ordinary man caught between his homeland in the countryside, and his professional life in the city, the two causing a great deal of strife in his life as he tries to seek out that elusive sense of belonging. Inspired by this movement towards a new kind of Western, told from a daring and unique perspective, To Kill a Mongolian Horse proves to be quite an impressive achievement, particularly considering the many different directions in which it travels to tell this moving but complex story.

We often find that contemporary films intent on exploring particular cultural details tend to focus on the recurring theme of tradition and modernity, two seemingly incompatible concepts that usually serve as the catalyst for dramatic tension as we see characters attempt to reconcile them in their own quest for a place to call home. Jiang is one of the many filmmakers who see the value in this approach, and uses it as the foundation for her film, which benefits from having such a simple but effective structure guiding its narrative. Constructed as a social realist parable, the film follows the continued efforts of a man who is caught between his childhood home in the sprawling steppes of Mongolia, and the life he adopted in the city. He divides his time between the two locations, in an effort to find the place where he feels most comfortable, but his domestic situation in both instances only complicates his feelings of being adrift between two locations, neither one of which feels as welcoming as he would hope. The director certainly does not leave this aspect of the story to the imagination, since she makes it abundantly clear from the start that this is the central premise from which she will be working to build this story. Alternating between the overwhelming beauty of the countryside and the cosmopolitan intrigue of an urban space, the film provides a fascinating depiction of duality and how our protagonist handles these divided feelings. The film presents a somber but life-affirming glimpse into the protagonist’s efforts to honor his culture and embrace the modern world, with his attempts to do so in tandem resulting in an unexpected conflict that forms the basis for the stark, hauntingly beautiful commentary that is central to the narrative.

However, To Kill a Mongolian Horse is much deeper than the traditional slice-of-life drama that it seems to be heading towards at the outset, which we discover through looking at the underlying themes that gradually emerge throughout the film. The main impetus for this story, outside of the aforementioned debate around tradition and modernity, is to explore a specific kind of mythological masculinity, which is usually associated with the Western genre and thus is something that Jiang is intent on examining. The character of Saina (named after the actor playing him) is a complex protagonist – he is intent on providing for his family, but finds himself struggling to live up to his responsibilities on both sides, whether as a functional parent to his child or a dutiful son to his father. His only comfort comes from the horses that he rears, his passion for these animals becoming the only aspect of his life that brings him any sense of worth. To say that he begins living a double life seems somewhat misguided, since the film chooses to present him as someone forced to choose between two different paths, and who finds himself trapped at the crossroads. Jiang presents a compelling and distinctly honest depiction of masculinity, showing the protagonist as he attempts to reconcile two very different ways of life, encountering various challenges in the process. Saina delivers an extraordinary performance, a stoic but layered portrayal of a man doing his best to be a functional member of his community, but who consistently finds himself at odds with his own ambitions and desires, which are only complicated by the hostilities he encounters while voyaging through the ambiguous space between two very different environments and the lifestyles they represent.

From its earliest moments, it is made quite clear that To Kill a Mongolian Horse is not motivated by the desire to be dense or complex. Instead, it is a film that relishes its simplicity, telling a relatively unfurnished story about a man seeking a sense of belonging while battling both the specter of the past and his own anxieties about the future. Jiang may be a newcomer, but she immediately establishes herself as an essential voice in contemporary global cinema, which we find in both the narrative and its execution. The story is straightforward and told with razor-sharp precision, while the direction is remarkable – the compositions are striking, with both the framing and use of color drawing us into the world of the film, showing us the deeper messages hidden in the silences between bold artistic exclamations that populate the film. The director manages to mostly avoid any sense of heavy-handed emotion, but does infuse the film with a tenderness that eventually reveals itself to contain a kind of existential bleakness, one particularly centered around the banality of everyday life, and the challenges that can come when someone sets out to break the monotony of their routine, which is not always as easy to accomplish as it would seem in theory. A fascinating and well-crafted film that contains many meaningful elements echoing the traditions of the Western genre, To Kill a Mongolian Horse is a loving but hard-hitting ode to those people adrift in a world that they find hostile and confusing, and a bold testament to their resilience, which is nothing if not admirable and deeply resonant.