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.