On Swift Horses (April 30)

Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar-Jones (who is not Daisy Ridley) star alongside Diego Calva, Sasha Calle, and Will Poulter in the period flick that assumes that basically everyone is a little bit gay? The opening sequence is white hot Christmas wincest fanfic: Edgar-Jones completes the pendulum swing from Twisters to start the movie off with a nude sex scene that tumbles into a love triangle with her husband Lee’s dashing and sensitive brother, Julius (Elordi). But because everyone is a little bit gay by the law of this movie, we need a little bit of a time jump to separate everyone and then give them one or two credible same sex love interests while also punching up the 60s glam matte lipstick and blue tinted sunglasses, horse races and Las Vegas.

Spoiler territory. Part of what makes the movie sing is the way that those initial interactions we get at the beginning start to morph the farther down the road we go. The will-they-won’t-they Anora feel of the movie deteriorates even as the characters continue to pine for the past with new lovers. Poulter’s Lee seems perfectly capable of loving his brother but also seeing him for what he is, not just gay at a time when the police were knocking down doors to arrest gay people out in public, but also selfish, unreliable, and manipulative. There’s this element of polysemy in the way that Julius treats Muriel, something that in the moment feels like sensitivity to what she actually needs, a deeper knowledge of her basic desires, her need to be more than just a wife, just a small town farm girl, but it might also be that he notices she’s queer too, out of place, in need of affection, but also it might be that he thinks the only thing he can offer to others is flirtation and his body? Muriel feels tortured by not being able to identify which of those things it is, even as she herself is criticized by her lover for being too good at compartmentalizing: “What I’m just trying to have fun?” “You come here and have sex to feel alive and then you go back to him and have sex to feel normal.” Muriel’s effortless lying to maintain her life and keep her loved ones happy is so excruciating but also glossed over in the second act, and then reexamined in the third act in a lovely Fighting With My Family type twist.

It feels like a companion movie to Carol in many ways, and a little out of place as an April release, but absolute fun.