“A horse doesn’t know whether the rider on his back wears a dress or pants away from the track.”–Diane Crump

DIRECTED BY: Luis Ortega

FEATURING: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Daniel Fanego, Osmar Núñez, Roberto Carnaghi, Mariana Di Girólamo

PLOT: Horse jockey Remo Manfredini has fallen from the heights of his profession, afflicted with a host of addictions, tormented by his failing relationship with his fellow rider and pregnant girlfriend Abril, and feeling escalating pressure from his boss Sirena, a gangster who has tried to go straight by investing heavily in racing. After an incident on the track, Remo escapes the hospital and wanders the streets of the city trying to figure out what will bring him happiness, salvation, and renewal. All the while, he is pursued by Sirena’s henchmen, the police, and Abril hoping to save him from doom; ultimately, salvation may come in the form of an entirely new identity.

BACKGROUND:El Jockey was Argentina’s official submission in the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards. The film debuted in competition at the Venice Film Festival. (It received no awards.)The horse Remo rides into catastrophe bears the name Mishima, presumably shared with the notorious author and self-destructive political ideologue.Ortega claims that the story was suggested in part by the Jack London novel “The Star Rover,” about a convicted murderer who escapes torture by going into a trance where he explores alternate lives. He has also cited a conversation with his ex-partner about how he could salvage their failing relationship. Her response–“You would have to die and be reborn. Then maybe you can fix it”–appears in the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Having driven a prize racehorse directly into a wrought iron fence, Manfredini wakes up with an egg-shaped head bandage and a case of anisocoria that makes him look like David Bowie. Remo stumbles onto the street in the manner of one of Monty Python’s Pepperpot ladies, but with a touching amount of uncertainty and wounded dignity. The look exemplifies the strange netherspace the character occupies and, through Pérez Biscayart’s haunted but ingenuous performance, the distance he must travel to find a better fate.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Locker room dance party; a baby always conveniently at hand

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The jockey is in a liminal state. Trapped between life and death, male and female, victory and defeat, substance and nonexistence, he is Schrodinger’s jockey. Remo’s journey to Dolores and beyond is played initially as screwball tragedy, then as black comedy, and finally as a redemptive triumph. Throughout, our hero walks through the film with a confusion and innocence that arouse sympathy even as the situations around him/her become increasingly absurd.  

Official trailer for Kill the Jockey

COMMENTS: As part of the handicapping for each race, jockeys must be weighed before they can take their place on the track. Yet when Remo Manfredini steps onto the scale in his local bodega, he doesn’t register so much as an ounce of weight. The device detects the weight of the gun the jockey is carrying, but not the human being doing the carrying. He breathes, he drinks, he moves about the locker room, but somehow, Remo does not exist. A doctor will eventually say that his injuries are “not compatible with life.” Indeed, he can barely connect to it.

To the extent that Kill the Jockey is a comedy, it is about the complete disconnect between Remo, who is trapped in an existential, informally medicated haze, and the rest of the world, laboring under the delusion that there is nothing wrong with the wayward rider. No one notices that Remo preps for competition by downing a concoction of whiskey (illicitly stored inside an icon of the Virgin Mary), cigarette smoke, and horse tranquilizers. The effects are obvious: as the track announcer declares him to be one of the sport’s greats, Remo falls off the horse with a gymnastic pratfall. In the midst of a discussion about his failing relationship with baby mama Abril, he absentmindedly walks off a second-story loft. Most critically, entrusted with a million-dollar steed by his dangerous but trusting boss, Reno rides the animal at full speed directly into a fence. There’s something ludicrous about the way everyone ignores what is directly in front of them.

There’s a lot of that going around, though. The mobster Sirena has successfully rehabilitated his image, adorning billboards and magazine covers as a pillar of the business community; this, even though he is still being attended at every moment by his stereotypical coterie of enforcers, and in spite of the fact that his signature of carrying his beloved infant in his arms is highly suspect, especially considering that the baby hasn’t aged in years and is a different infant every time we see him, even changing its race. We see what we want to see.

Correspondingly, we be what we want to be. True, he’s suffering from a massive head injury, but when Remo and his turban-like head bandage spot a mink coat and a purse hanging on the hook in his hospital room, it’s not a big leap to decide that they’re his, and that he is actually a woman named Lola. The universe readily agrees. Children recognize a woman, while grown men yell at an old bat. At the same time, Abril (played by the stunningly beautiful Corberó) instigates Remo’s journey by telling him that he would have to be reborn to come back to her—but she is on one of her own, already forming an attraction to fellow rider Ana during a sex-drenched impromptu pre-race stretching session that turns the locker room into Buenos Aires’ hottest nightclub. Ana’s playful spotting of a bird on the city subway feels like an excuse for a stolen kiss, a classically movie-style romantic gesture. It means something else when Ortega reverses the shot to reveal a real bird happily chirping away. In the subway car.

Kill the Jockey has a gender switch at its center, but it is something grander, more ambitious than a transgender story. Remo becomes Delores not because of misassignment or as a biological corrective but because they find salvation in the ability to be reborn as someone new, a goal that ultimately realized literally in the final scene. You can change your identity as much and as often as you wish, but Ortega’s movie argues that a blank slate is the only true way to empty the scale.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A colorful Argentine oddity…  Luis Ortega’s alternately dark and daffy eighth feature is suitably untethered for a story concerned with the malleability of the self. That comes at some cost to its impact, however: Awash with kooky gags and bolstered by the strange, soulful presence of leading man Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s fun but flighty, liable to throw some viewers from the saddle.”–Guy Lodge, Variety (contemporaneous)“Visually lush and full of playful mystery, this equestrian-themed psychological thriller-comedy-whatsit strikes plenty of poses that may tickle the fancy of viewers with a taste for camp, surrealism and/or the absurd.” – Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK:  Kill the Jockey (2024)

OFFICIAL SITE:Kill the Jockey – International Films – Independent Films – Music Box Films – The US distributor’s site hosts the trailer, critics’ quotes, technical info, and a set of stills

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Hammer to Nail: A Conversation with Luis Ortega – The director speaks about his relationship with his cinematographer, his composer, and the Jack London novel that inspired the film.

FilmInt: Building a Mask: Luis Ortega on Kill the Jockey – The filmmaker talks about collaborations, his distaste for themes, and why he doesn’t trust eyes

.APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: KILL THE JOCKEY (2024) – Giles Edwards’ original Apocrypha Candidate review

HOME VIDEO INFO:Music Box Selects (in collaboration with Vinegar Syndrome) released Kill the Jockey on Blu-ray (buy) or a much cheaper DVD (buy) in early 2026. The only meaningful extra feature is an interview with star Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, but there is an image gallery and two trailers. Naturally, the film can also be found on VOD (at the time of this writing, it’s free on Prime Video, Tubi, and several other streamers).

Where to watch Kill the Jockey