The editor’s note: This review was originally published during Toronto International 2024 Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics release ”On fast horses“In theaters on Friday 25 April.
“A player has only one obligation: to stay informed.”
When Julius (Jacob Elordi) distributes this wisdom to his sister -in -law Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) He apparently speaks of cheating in card games. But in “On fast horses,” His words cause ripples under the surface of a provisional family where almost everyone lives a lie. He is a player who is dependent on the tops of life and crosses desert casinos to chase the excitement to steal a quick money and volatile relations with gay lovers. And she is a married woman whose attraction for other women is becoming more difficult and harder to ignore, which urges her to start investing in horses to finance the kind of double life that she begins to suspect that she will need. Like mal to dueling flames, they were always drawn to each other in a relationship that blurred the boundary between family and sexual-but when the two players keep their eyes peeled for information, each one suspects that the other can share in their most guarded secret.
How did we end up here? Julius and his brother Lee (Will Poulter) had long planned to leave the Midwest after serving in Korea, taken their military pensions and started a sunny new life in California. The Eisenhower era was filled with opportunities for Americans who were keen to start living their lives after the war, and the two men saw nothing but the opportunity in front of them on the golden coast. But Julius, an operating noise maker who was never one who stayed in a single place too long, could not make himself stay on the pitch. His healthy brother was not willing to wait for him, so he marries Muriel and buys a plot while waiting for his black sheep brother to figure out his life.
Julius can be unreliable, but he is very loyal, pops in and out of their lives with semi-rule when he conducts his own adventure life. His bill for counting cards takes him to Las Vegas, where he consults himself into a job as a casino security guard who has the task of catching cheaters with the help of the techniques he perfected. While lurking in the beam, he opens a close friendship with Henry (Diego Calva), a colleague card fraud who had the same idea of becoming legitimate. Things are quickly heated between them, and they soon shake up together and discuss whether they should move to California to be close to Lee and Muriel or Bolt for Tijuana where they could build a castle.
But while Julius is happy to keep his cards close to his well -toned chests, Henry scratches to get out of the shadows. He asks Julius to go back to play and suggest that they start working together to cheat in casinos around Vegas. His request has less to do with games than a desire to be seen in public with his boyfriend, but Julius pragmatism prevails until there is an important stick point in their relationship. When Henry eventually caught games, he is sent away and the two lovers are separated indefinitely.
Meanwhile in California, Muriel is doing a much better job of having her cake and eating it too. While Lee works manually all day, her job as Diner waitress gives her access to local players who waste secrets about horse racing while she intervenes. When she starts placing her own efforts, she quickly ends up with a significant income that allows her to build a living egg while working much fewer shifts. She uses her free time to explore her sexuality, after her crushes from the tracks to the local gay bar before she opens her own connection with her neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle) while she daydreams about what Julius can be up to.
Julius and Muriel take different paths to the same goal, but the balances for each strategy start to reveal over time. He avoids social conventions and lived his life in the types of fringes available to queer people in the 1950s America, which allowed him to persecute his wishes more aggressively but placed him in more danger. She prioritized safety and did her best to maintain the facade of a loving marriage as she dipped her toe in the water in connection with the same sex. But while she always had a roof over her head and a place in society, she accidentally hurts everyone around her by being half in and a half of each relationship.
Elordi and Edgar-Jones embody seamlessly the two lost souls, each playing to their own forces while remaining connected with an invisible thread of common pain. Elordi plays the strong and silent type and flaunts his sexy facade as he reveals endless amounts of pain behind his eyes. And Edgar-Jones’ Muriel is a carefully made person who always goes on eggshells, never really her true self for fear that a shadow lurking around the corner may be waiting to catch her in the action. Still, the joy that both emits when they are together, even in platonic moments, fills those with a sense of agency and humanity that often avoids characters in queer period pieces that lean too heavily on suffering porn.
“On Swift Horses” is a fantastic tableau of almost romance, weave together volatile moments of magic with the pain that inevitably follows when the universe removes them. One of the best aspects of Daniel Mine’s Film is the fact that it lacks a conventional villain. Everyone – even Lee, whose very existence is the biggest obstacle to Julius and Muriel that is honest – makes their best effort to be a good person in a world that seems determined to remove everyone from them.
Bryce Kass’ script (based on Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name) extends over an ideal line between sentimentality and bitterness, while Minahan and Kinematographer Luc Montipellier shoot everything from dry sex scenes to Christmas Eve Moonlight walks with the elegance it deserves. The result is a cinematic love story that develops with the kind of beautiful uncertainty that its game heroes face every day. In love, as in casinos and tracks, success is far from guaranteed – if anything, it is statistically unlikely. But sometimes the life -confirming act is enough to take the chance to start with to make it worth it.
Rating: A-
“On Swift Horses” premiered at TIFF 2024. Sony Pictures Classics release the movie Friday 25 April 2025.
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