Director David Minahan has not made a movie in over 20 years. He’s mostly directed a lot of television, but returned to the world of film for an adaptation of the Shannon Pufhal novel On Swift Horses. After having premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the film is coming out in very limited release from Sony Pictures Classics this weekend. And the limited release doesn’t make sense initially, given that you have an exciting new dramatic film starring some of our biggest up and coming names of the day. Unfortunately, the longer you get into On Swift Horses’ runtime, the more the limited release begins to make sense. 

Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) moves to California from Kansas with her husband Lee (Will Poulter) in the mid 1950s. He wants the traditional family and suburban house and white picket fence and Muriel is not sure what she wants, but it isn’t that. She’s kind of infatuated with her husband’s brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) and her new neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle) seems to be grabbing her attention too, but of course at the time, homosexuality is criminalized. Meanwhile, Julius has recently returned from the Korean War and sort of hops around from place to place, searching for his purpose. He settles in Las Vegas, and starts working at a casino where he meets and begins a secret romance with the dashing and elusive Henry (Diego Calva). As these people discover the truth about themselves, all will reach a boiling point.

There is so much about On Swift Horses that should work, and a lot of the time it does. The performances here are great and the characters are interesting on a surface level, but as a study of repressed queerness in the 1950s, it’s all either too much or not enough. There is too much plot here for the time allotted, and it kept going through my mind that this would have made a killer miniseries. For what’s going on with these five people to really matter to the viewer, we need to spend more time with them, and that time is unfortunately not on this film’s side. Running at just under two hours, it sometimes drags toward the middle and sometimes feels like it’s moving way too fast, undercutting moments that should leave more of an emotional impact. 

The performances here, however, are never the problem. I don’t think I’ve seen Jacob Elordi this good, and his career trajectory has been exciting to watch. Following his work in HBO’s megahit Euphoria, Elordi has been mostly been doing a lot of weird little indie films, and it’s one of my favorite things where a classically handsome up-and-coming actor picks the weird projects that have substance over the obvious paycheck gigs. And if his work here is any indication, Elordi has a very bright future ahead of him as an actor. His chemistry with Babylon’s Diego Calva is electric and sizzling, and his chemistry with Daisy Edgar-Jones is fascinating, as we never know how much of this perceived chemistry is just happening from one angle. The Muriel character is more interesting, because she feels trapped by the conformity of the 1950s and she’s not sure what she wants sexually or out of life in general, and Elordi’s storyline kind of mirrors this. And there’s so much emotional truth in the work both actors are doing, and I loved their performances.

Will Poulter is also really good as this person who is on the sidelines of what’s going on here, but might not be quite as clueless as we initially think. Sasha Calle is also very good as the elusive, seductive figure who catches Muriel’s eye. I would say her character feels more like an idea than an actual person, but Calle seems to be constantly bringing more to the proceedings than what’s on the page. However, the characters being more ideas than people is a problem that permeates throughout On Swift Horses. Despite the two leading performers managing to break out of the traps this screenplay is setting for them, the character archetypes feel rather rudimentary and uninspired. We don’t know most of these people well enough to have an emotional investment in what happens to them, and that’s our central problem here.

I will say our technical aspects here are very good. Sarah Polley’s frequent cinematographer Luc Montpellier shot this, and to his credit, the film always looks beautiful, despite a lack of creativity in the camerawork. Erin Magill’s production design evokes a very recognizable cookie-cutter 1950s, and Jeriana San Juan’s costume design evokes an elegance often associated with that time period, most evident in cultural touchstones like Mad Men, or films like Revolutionary Road. The score by Mark Orton is grand and sweeping and fits the mood effectively, and the music supervision gives us a lot of needle drops that are different from what is often used in these movies. So, yeah, it looks great and everyone in this movie is beautiful, but the writing is kind of giving you nothing.

Part of me has to wonder if On Swift Horses was envisioned as a miniseries before David Minihan scraped together enough financial backing and had enough buzzy names interested to get a film production off the ground. I wonder this because the problems evident in On Swift Horses are so clear and so fixable, that it’s a bit confounding why they weren’t fixed. Another writer could have been brought onboard to fix Bryce Kass’ inept and shallow script, or they could have gone to HBO Max or Apple TV with this exact same cast and different writers and done something wonderful with it. But it’s all a bit of an irrelevant point because the film we’re left with is the skeleton of a great story that really could mean something substantial to a lot of people, but instead we’re just left with this frustrating final product that almost gets there and falls a bit short. See it for the lovely performances and beautiful visuals, but maybe adjust your expectations slightly on what you might take away from the film emotionally.