“A gambler only has one obligation: to keep himself informed.”
When Julius (Jacob Elordi) dispenses this wisdom to his sister-in-law Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) he’s ostensibly talking about cheating in card games. But in “On Swift Horses,” his words cause ripples beneath the surface in a makeshift family where nearly everyone is living a lie. He’s a gambler addicted to the highs of life, traversing desert casinos to chase the thrill of stealing a quick buck and fleeting connections with gay lovers. And she’s a married woman whose attraction to other women is becoming harder and harder to ignore, prompting her to start betting on horses to fund the kind of double life she’s starting to suspect she’ll need. Like moths to dueling flames, they were always drawn to each other in a relationship that blurred the line between familial and sexual — but as the two gamblers keep their eyes peeled for information, each begins to suspect that the other might share in their most closely-guarded secret.
How did we end up here? Julius and his brother Lee (Will Poulter) had long planned to leave the Midwest behind after serving in Korea, taking their military pensions and starting a sunny new life in California. The Eisenhower era was filled with opportunity for Americans eager to start living their post-war lives, and the two men saw nothing but opportunity ahead of them on the golden coasts. But Julius, a drifting troublemaker who was never one to stay in a single place for too long, couldn’t bring himself to stick to the plan. His strait-laced brother wasn’t willing to wait around for him, so he marries Muriel and buys a plot of land while they wait for his black sheep brother to figure his life out.
Julius might be unreliable, but he’s very loyal, popping in and out of their lives with semi-regularity as he pursues his own life of adventure. His knack for counting cards takes him to Las Vegas, where he cons his way into a job as a casino security guard tasked with catching cheaters using the very techniques he perfected. While lurking in the rafters, he strikes up a close friendship with Henry (Diego Calva), a fellow card cheat who had the same idea about going legitimate. Things quickly heat up between them, and they’re soon shacking up together debating whether they should move to California to be near Lee and Muriel or bolt for Tijuana where they could build themselves a castle.
But while Julius is content to keep their cards close to their well-toned chests, Henry is itching to come out of the shadows. He begs Julius to go back to gambling, proposing that they start working together to cheat in casinos around Vegas. His request has less to do with gambling than a desire to be seen in public with his boyfriend, but Julius’ pragmatism prevails until it becomes a major sticking point in their relationship. When Henry is eventually caught gambling, he’s 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 does manual labor all day, her job as a diner waitress affords her access to local gamblers who spill secrets about horse racing while she eavesdrops. Once she starts placing her own bets, she quickly ends up with a sizable income that allows her to build a nest egg while working far fewer shifts. She uses her free time to explore her sexuality, following her crushes from the tracks to the local gay bar before striking up a connection of her own with her neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle) while daydreaming about what Julius might be up to.
Julius and Muriel take different paths towards the same goal, but the trade-offs of each approach begin to reveal themselves with time. He eschewed societal conventions and lived his life in the kinds of fringe spaces that were accessible to queer people in 1950s America, which allowed him to pursue his desires more aggressively but placed him in more danger. She prioritized safety, doing her best to maintain the facade of a loving marriage while dipping her toe into the waters of same-sex relationship. But while she always had a roof over her head and a place in society, she unintentionally hurts everyone around her by being half in and half out of every relationship.
Elordi and Edgar-Jones seamlessly embody the two lost souls, each playing to their own strengths while remaining connected by an invisible thread of common pain. Elordi plays the strong and silent type, flaunting his sexy facade while revealing endless amounts of pain behind his eyes. And Edgar-Jones’ Muriel is a carefully manufactured persona that’s always walking on eggshells, never quite being her true self for the fear that a shadow lurking around the corner might be waiting to catch her in the act. Yet the joy that both emit when they’re together, even in platonic moments, fills them with a sense of agency and humanity that often evades characters in queer period pieces that lean too heavily on suffering porn.
“On Swift Horses” is a stunning tableau of almost-romances, weaving together ephemeral moments of magic with the pain that inevitably follows when the universe takes them away. One of the best aspects of Daniel Minahan’s film is the fact that it lacks a conventional villain. Everyone — even Lee, whose very existence is the biggest obstacle towards Julius and Muriel living honestly — makes their best effort to be a good person in a world that seems determined to take everyone away from them.
Bryce Kass’ script (based on Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name) straddles an ideal line between sentimentality and bitterness, while Minahan and cinematographer Luc Montipellier shoot everything from torrid sex scenes to Christmas Eve moonlight strolls with the elegance that it deserves. The result is a cinematic love story that unfolds with the kind of beautiful uncertainty that its gambling heroes face every day. In love, like at the casinos and the tracks, success is far from guaranteed — if anything, it’s statistically unlikely. But sometimes, the life-affirming act of taking the chance to begin with is enough to make it all worth it.
Grade: A-
“On Swift Horses” premiered at TIFF 2024. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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