Kill the Jockey – first-look review

There’s a lot happening in Kill the Jockey, the latest surrealist venture from Argentinian director Luis Ortega, and it’s not always certain why. There’s the disgraced jockey himself – Remo, played with hilarious disaffection by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart – who we meet at the start of the film, doped up on ketamine and losing all his races. There’s his titular death that proves to be far more metaphorical than literal (although not for lack of trying). And then there’s the myriad of intersecting subplots and twists that punctuate its relatively short runtime: Remo’s pregnant girlfriend Abril (a jockey herself) and her liaisons with yet another jockey played by Mariana Di Girólamo; Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the dodgy businessman with a baby constantly in tow; Sirena’s various goons, and the slow introduction of the enigmatic “Dolores” into Remo’s life. Not everything in Kill the Jockey coheres together, but there’s a certain bemused exhilaration in watching its tender absurdities play out, even when they make very little sense.

The film’s throughline, such as it is, unfolds as follows: Remo, depressed and alienated from his life purpose as a jockey, sustains supposedly life-threatening injuries but recovers almost immediately and absconds from the hospital in stolen women’s clothes. Subversion plays on top of subversion here; what appears to begin as a somewhat traditional take on masculinity – part sports drama, part The Godfather-like gangster film – devolves into an unmistakably queer take on family and selfhood, and what it is to become a person.

As the lines between Remo and Dolores begin to bend and blur – either in optimistically ambiguous or pessimistically confused ways – the film anchors itself in an exploration of gender fluidity not as death but as rebirth. The distinction is quietly moving, although there is something about the head injury that catalyses Remo’s transformation that feels a little off. Still, Kill the Jockey is clearly not a film that is striving for any kind of internal logic; rather, it is driven by a fervent belief in imagination and desire than any particular ideology. Everyone in Kill the Jockey exists in various states of wanting and losing and becoming, and it is these modes of change – their sensualities, their possibilities, their griefs – in which Ortega remains the most fascinated.

It may be a bit of a mess, narratively speaking, but Ortega’s quirky visual language and underlying chaotic air do much to move the film smartly along. Slapstick violence unfolds with a Looney Toons-style exaggeration, dance-offs take place against perfect needle drops, the camera moves – or refuses to move – with a delightfully sardonic air, and everyone on screen does everything with a blasé nihilism that can’t help but tickle. Silly, shambolic, and sincere, Kill the Jockey feels like the cinematic equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall: not all of it sticks, and some of it is overdone, but there is something charming about the wilfulness of doing it at all.