Kill the Jockey review – a mercurial, skittish crime drama whose hero is a drug-fuelled rogue

Venice film festival
Luis Ortega’s film veers off the racetrack as jockey Remo drifts around the city streets, pursued by a pregnant girlfriend who wants him back and a gangster who wants him dead

People ride horses for all sorts of reasons, explains the jockey hero of Luis Ortega’s offbeat and stylish Argentinian crime drama. They ride to arrive at their destination more quickly, or to wage war more effectively. Mostly, he says, they ride to escape. This jockey is familiar with the nagging urge to take flight. He is a study in motion, a figure in flux. Show him a fence and he will promptly jump it – or die trying.

There is much to relish in Kill the Jockey, not least Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s wonderfully stone-faced performance as Remo Manfredini, the rider who absolutely, positively has to win his next race in order to keep a gangster off his back. Biscayart plays Remo as though he is the soulful clown in a silent movie, Buster Keaton with a riding crop. He gives the impression of being the bemused lightning rod for events, as opposed to what he really is: an unruly, drug-fuelled rogue agent who is a danger to himself and pretty much everyone else around. “We know all about your unquenchable thirst for disaster,” says leathery Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the mob boss, in the brief moment of calm between the scene in which Remo performs a slapstick somersault at the starting gate and the moment when he gallops full-tilt at the race-track’s barricades.

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