REEL | Daisy Edgar-Jones Gambles 'On Swift Horses'

"Everything's looking real prosperous around here."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Rising stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi play in-laws, Muriel and Julius, on similar paths apart in veteran television director Daniel Minahan's monochromatic, mid-'50s period queer romantic drama about post-Korean War relocation in the still unconquered American West. On Swift Horses' dual parallel romances represent the constrained and repressed cultural identity of the time, based on Kansas author Shannon Pufahl's novel of the same name, as adapted by screenwriter Bryce Kass.

A square-jawed, perfect-seeming Will Poulter as Muriel's well-meaning but cookie-cutter husband and Julius' settled "good brother" grounds the two restrained lead performances of lost souls, both quietly unsatisfied by the rigid expectations and social conformity of the society or times they live in. Surrounding the trio, Diego Calva and Sasha Calle contrast them as sexy, more exciting love interests who inject a sense of manageable danger into their lives as Muriel wins it big by secretly gambling on horse races and Julius detours to the seedy glamour of Las Vegas to find himself and delay real adulthood.

On Swift Horses dispassionately reflects its mid-century sense of everyday suburban malaise and the restrictive trappings of the promise of the American Dream. Characters head west to California to leave their midwestern Kansas lives and problems behind or find more prosperity and middle-class triumph, but remain deeply unsettled despite the superficial sheen of white affluence. How the film sets up Edgar-Jones and Elordi together before almost immediately separating them on different but complementary tracks of self-discovery makes the burgeoning Eisenhower era it depicts all the more historically reflective.


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