Alison Brie commits to the slyly funny but frustratingly ambiguous Horse Girl
Film Reviews Movie Review
Trauma sprawls outward in Horse Girl, a new drama from filmmaker Jeff Baena and actor and co-writer Alison Brie. The movie’s twee dressings—woven friendship anklets, colorful God’s eye votives, and, well, horses—decorate an uncomfortable portrait of a young woman struggling with loneliness and isolation. Horse Girl is sympathetic to Brie’s character, but the film’s ambiguous ending undermines its thoughtful consideration of mental illness.
On the gamut from extraordinary to unremarkable, thirtysomething Sarah (Brie) exists somewhere in the middle. She’s an efficient salesperson at the arts and crafts store Good Lengths, chatting knowledgeably about tempera versus acrylic paint and the differences in various fabrics. She gets along well with her boss, Joan (Molly Shannon), and is friendly with the other salespeople, lighting up when a younger coworker chats about her high school crush. She’s also congenial with her roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan), who usually retreats to her bedroom with her judgmental boyfriend (whom the movie mocks relentlessly for his aspiring-mumble-rapper affectations) when Sarah is obsessively watching the supernatural-influenced crime procedural Purgatory. Besides that pastime and hours spent sweating hard at Zumba class, Sarah fills her free time with almost daily trips to stables outside of town to visit her horse, Willow, whom she used to ride when she was younger.
Incrementally, this carefully maintained air of normalcy begins to dissipate, ushered along by a series of clever plot reveals. Willow has a new rider, and though Sarah pointedly coaches her, the girl is not—as the film initially implies—her daughter. (The teen, who treats Sarah with the polite distance of a stranger, can’t speed-walk to her mother’s car fast enough.) Although Sarah tells Joan she doesn’t know much about her family, a shoebox of old photographs offers glimpses of relatives, including a maternal grandmother to whom Sarah bears a very close resemblance. It’s through dream sequences of a white room and a glowing portal that Horse Girl moves fully into a reality-questioning direction. “My mom used to say that I have an overactive imagination,” Sarah tells Nikki when she comes home in the middle of the night after an inexplicable sleepwalking episode. But does that really explain what’s going on?
Brie undergoes an impressive transformation, investing herself physically and emotionally into a character whose paranoia bursts to the surface in manic flashes. She lends Sarah an initially charming and sunny disposition, whether flirting with an unexpected suitor during her birthday party, lavishing tender attention on Willow, or implying years of friendship with Joan in the easy, early chemistry between her and Shannon. So the contrast is shocking once Brie begins mutating her heroine—through random nosebleeds and lost time—into someone progressively disconnected from her own body and only intermittently aware of her surroundings. Baena, who previously directed Brie in The Little Hours and Joshy, demarcates the phases of Sarah’s metamorphosis through the repetition of key images: Willow’s eye, water flowing down a drain, verdant tree branches seemingly floating in a blue sky. He also creates jarring transitions between dreams and reality, matching the film’s changing mood through the use of a score that moves from cheery to eccentrically experimental.
Horse Girl’s big weakness is that it can’t decide how much ambiguity to provide its central character, or how seriously it wants to present Sarah’s breakdown (or, if you read the film another way, her awakening). By refusing to clarify its plot, the film flattens its message about the inherited possibility and genetic trauma of mental illness. Sarah is plainly an unreliable narrator, and Baena ensures that details about the character’s personality operate in conversation with her journey. (Her favorite show being called Purgatory says quite a bit). But the gamification of the story cheapens it, so that an interesting character study starts looking—with the introduction of outlandish elements—more like a puzzle box in need of solving. This doesn’t totally paralyze Brie’s strong performance. But the muddled message does hobble it.
31 Comments
So this is what happened to Adderol Annie after she retired from professional wrestling.
* ABCU: Alison Brie Cinematic Universe
On the one hand, I love Alison Brie. On the other hand, I detest “it’s unclear what’s real” narratives.
Or just generally ambiguous narratives. I’m looking at you, final episode of ‘Russian Doll’!
Eh, I’m okay with ambiguous narratives (or at least I don’t mind them so much, it depends on whether I’m in a mood to think about what I just saw means or if I just want the story to give me a definite opinion). But any amount of “I can’t tell what’s real” drives me nuts.
I appreciated the ending of Russian Doll. We were, just like our surrogates the characters, in the midst of it and had no idea what happened, only that they resolved their time loop death curse together. I didn’t need to know why to enjoy it.
in order to prove to myself that i know what’s going on more than others, i’m going to assume this comment is ironic, and that you’re actually Old Man Dikachu of yore, and that you love ambiguous narratives, love them.
can’t wait to see how this turns out in the…. hm. Unsatisfying.
If you don’t stop stumbling through Dimension Doors we’re going to put you in the old wizards’ home.
thing is, the olds don’t last long around me, and once Management twigs then it’s under the bridge again for old Archie. “Insurance premiums” they say. They’re just lazy, donn’t want to buy the industrial industrial cleaners.
While I generally feel narrative ambiguity gives the viewer more credit, the number of movies about whether this metaphysical experience is real or mental illness now far outweigh the ones where the resolution is concrete.One thing that made 10 Cloverfield Lane so refreshing was that there was, in fact, an alien-induced plague and John Goodman was evil!
I may be the only one who remembers the film fondly (or at all), but K-pax handled it surprisingly well, examining it logically, giving two compelling arguments for the two sides, and then giving you just enough info, that you felt like you knew. Technically ambiguous still though.
I liked K-PAX. I could watch Jeff Bridges in nearly anything, and despite Kevin Spacey’s problematic personal life, I can’t think of any roles he’s played that have been a let-down either.
It’s even more striking just how few movies try to portray mental illness without relying on narrative ambiguity. There was a great, underrated movie in the mid 2000s callef Revolution 9 that is unambiguously about a man having a psychotic break. But it plays his paranoia and disconnection from reality as a thriller rather than a maudlin drama, which keeps it from being a depressing slog.
I forgot about that one. I remember liking it a lot.
“But the muddled message does hobble it.”I see what you did there. I had to race to the comments to post about it before anyone else.
Congrats, you were certainly first past the post on that.
This is why we canter have nice things.
You should have reined in your comment. Quit horsin’ around!
The premise sounds like a gentrified version of The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
But is it humorously funny?
I feel like a lot of “is it really happening or is the character going insane” narratives are written by a lot of people who had a really good idea for a science fiction / fantasy / horror story but were afraid that people would be turned off by something that was outright science fiction / fantasy / horror so decided to hedge their bets.
Agreed.
in their defense, i thought hereditary got a lot worse when it stopped being a question of reality
Hmm… I could have sworn Alison Brie just finished another show about a horse…
I guess I’ll just try and make you understandThat I’m more horse then a girl,Or I’m more girl than a horse.
Back in the ‘20s, I was in two horse-related TV shows…
So this is just Black Swan with horses instead of ballet?
i just saw this and i didn’t find it to be a thoughtful consideration of mental illness (fun to watch tho). it started off as one – the moment with her old friend was especially powerful – but it got increasingly ridiculous as it went on and turned into straight pageantry by the end.i also didn’t think the story was that ambiguous considering she never once got any outside evidence from anyone else for anything she believed. it was just aestheticizing disassociation. which, like, can work sometimes (The Caretaker, Still Alice, Legion), but…imo any film that ~examines~ mental illness by having its lead shout “who do you work for? who do you work for?!?” is missing the mark.
also PS i’m gonna retroactively award this criticism to Black Swan too and say that The Wrestler was way better
I’m sorry but if anyone thinks the ending of this movie is ambiguous or open to interpretation… go back to film watching school.
Why, the bruises prove it!
i completely agree with your quote “an interesting character study starts looking—with the introduction of outlandish elements—more like a puzzle box in need of solving” which kind of cheapens the film, but to me, this film is in no way ambiguous.
it’s the origin story of the crazy people you see living on the street. this is exactly how it happens. i think that’s why the films’ title is what it is. in that town, i bet she started being known as ‘horse girl’ like the guy outside her work or her grandmother. and like her grandmother, she’s probably going to die alone on some bark bench.
very sad movie that could have hit a lot harder without the little fun mystery-solving.
As someone who has witnessed someone slowly descend into psychosis Alison Brie’s performance was uncomfortably familiar. I thought I had misread the trailer and this was actually a painfully real portrait of mental illness. And then there’s the conversation with her room mate in hospital and the ambiguous ending and it cheapened it all.