An ‘overwrought’ drama about hidden gay lives

Amid a starry cast, Edgar-Jones especially gives a “beautifully understated” turn as a woman struggling with same-sex attraction – but there’s too much plot for the film’s own good.

In its bare-bones plot, On Swift Horses sounds like a love triangle, or maybe quadrangle, set in the repressed 1950s. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Will Poulter play Muriel and Lee, young marrieds who move from Kansas to California, and Jacob Elordi plays Lee’s brother, Julius. It is clear from the start that Muriel is more dutiful than excited about marrying Lee, and that there is a strong connection between her and her brother-in-law. Instead of focusing, predictably, on that triangle, with Muriel at the centre, the film attempts something more subtle and complicated. The spark between Muriel and Julius is not sexual. He goes to Las Vegas, where he enters a passionate relationship with Henry (Diego Calva), while Muriel grapples with her own unhappiness and attraction to women. It is a story of subterfuge, secrets and recognitions hardly ever spoken out loud. And it works much better as an idea than as a film.

Despite Edgar-Jones’s beautifully understated performance, On Swift Horses only sporadically comes to life. Its sluggish pacing makes it feel pedestrian. The style is not natural or convincing enough to take us into its fictional world, yet it is not stylised enough to be poetic. The director, Daniel Minahan, best known for television series including Fellow Travelers, has put together a film that is thoughtfully conceived and mostly lifeless.

The film follows Julius and Muriel on parallel tracks most of the time, as they echo each other’s journeys. Edgar-Jones and Elordi have very few scenes face to face, which may be why Julius’s insistence that they know each other instinctively, including their same-sex attractions, is never quite convincing.  

The film looks sunny and dazzling at times. In San Diego, Muriel dresses up in her ladylike ’50s hats and goes to the racetrack, but keeps that fact and most of her winnings to herself, hiding money in the lining of her purse. That is just the start of her secret life. An elegant woman at the track slips her a matchbook with the name of a place Muriel doesn’t yet know is a gay hotel and bar. She does know that she is drawn to her neighbour, Sandra (Sasha Calle). Edgar-Jones captures the thrill of secrecy and freedom Muriel experiences under her guise as a conventional wife.   

Meanwhile, Julius, who has been adrift as a card shark and a hustler, gets a real job in a Las Vegas casino spotting cheaters for the management, where he meets Henry, who is all for teaming up to cheat that casino. Elordi looks the part of a ’50s hunk, but his acting is flat even when he is meant to be wildly obsessed with Henry. Calva is dynamic as the volatile Henry, whose devotion to Julius comes and goes. And a reality check: Calva got a flurry of publicity last year for teasing what he called “pretty hot” sex scenes with Elordi, but that’s all relative. Those scenes are tame next to Fellow Travelers, which was far more explicit and fiery, and more convincing in its depiction of a passionate gay relationship. It’s not a news flash that the 1950s was a repressed and homophobic decade, and On Swift Horses fails to capture the tension and fear Julius lives with.

Poulter is exceptional, revealing the layers of awareness that make Lee more complicated than he first seems. He is unquestioning about his marriage and the American suburban dream everyone was supposed to want. But he knows more about his brother than he lets on. “I ain’t asking you to change, Julius. I just want you to be safe,” he says. He knows less about his wife, delicately warning her that Julius is not who she thinks he is. “He has passions of his own. He’s just not like us,” he tells her. When Henry disappears, Julius arrives in San Diego as he searches for him, and everything comes crashing down.

Bryce Kass’s screenplay, based on the 2019 novel by Shannon Pufahl, is overwrought with story. Muriel and Julius’s gambling, the emotional love triangle, the hidden gay lives – any one of them might have had enough drama for a film. Together they are a pile-up of too many problems. In a director’s statement, Minahan says of the film, “Gambling became code for queer love; money, a symbol of freedom for our heroes”. That might work as a conceit and a message, but it’s a leaden idea on screen. On Swift Horses isn’t a disaster, but given its stars and potential, it is a disappointment.

★★★☆☆