'On Swift Horses' explores desire, risk, and the pain of restraint

Daniel Minahan’s adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s novel turns love and longing into a slow-burning study of postwar yearning.

Will Poulter, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Jacob Elordi in "On Swift Horses." (c) Gunther Campine/Sony Pictures Classics

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

In On Swift Horses, the new film directed by Daniel Minahan and based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 debut novel, the boundaries between love, longing, and risk blur like sunlight through dust. Set in post-Korean War America, the story orbits the tension between what people feel, what they are allowed to express, and what they gamble in the hope of something more. In doing so, On Swift Horses reveals just how elusive — and combustible — desire can be when kept behind closed doors.

Though On Swift Horses doesn’t always land its emotional beats with precision, its slow-burning rhythm and visual splendor make the journey worthwhile. Minahan’s direction is patient, almost reverent, creating a mood in which small gestures — a glance, a cigarette shared, a hand resting on a windowsill — take on the weight of thunder.

Yearning in the margins

The film’s central figure is Muriel, played with aching restraint by Daisy Edgar-Jones. Muriel is recently married to Lee (Will Poulter), a soldier on leave from the Korean War. Their relationship feels gentle but not fully rooted, shaped more by circumstance than chemistry. They settle in Muriel’s inherited Kansas home — a space heavy with the memory of her late mother, a woman whose appetite for life haunts Muriel like a calling.

Muriel wants more — though she can’t quite name what that "more" is. That question arrives embodied in the form of Julius, Lee’s brother, played by Jacob Elordi. We first see him shirtless and sun-drunk, lounging on the hood of his car beneath Muriel’s bathroom window. It's a deliberate and disarming image, designed to jolt both Muriel and the audience out of the film’s sepia-toned hush. When Julius smirks up at her and offers a cigarette, the electricity between them crackles instantly.

Yet this is no traditional love triangle. The pull between Muriel and Julius is elemental and unspoken, a slow unraveling of their emotional codes. Julius is as enigmatic as he is magnetic. A discharged soldier with a penchant for gambling, he’s a drifter who lives by intuition and impulse — the opposite of Lee, who wants the stability of home and family.

An unspoken language

Once Lee and Muriel move to California, the narrative branches into competing undercurrents. Muriel tries to build a quiet life while quietly aching for something beyond it. Julius vanishes to Las Vegas, where he finds work in a casino and slips into a closeted relationship with a man named Henry (Diego Calva). The film renders this relationship with tenderness but also tension, as the era’s strict social norms force their love into hidden corners.

Muriel’s isolation intensifies. Her connection with Julius, though largely maintained through distance and occasional phone calls, grows in emotional potency. A new neighbor, Sandra (Sasha Calle), briefly introduces the possibility of female camaraderie — or perhaps more — further clouding the story’s already ambiguous map of attraction.

Where On Swift Horses succeeds is in showing how these characters circle one another like celestial bodies bound by gravity but forever out of reach. The chemistry between Edgar-Jones and Elordi is smoldering despite their limited shared screen time. In many ways, they are more like ideas to each other than actual people — projections of what the other lacks and secretly desires.

The style of longing

Visually, On Swift Horses is a dream. Cinematographer Larkin Seiple bathes the film in warm, vintage tones, using natural light to imbue each frame with a painterly touch. The camera lingers on faces, on cigarette smoke curling through sunbeams, on roadside motels and racing horses — all suffused with nostalgia and yearning.

Elordi is especially compelling, his physical presence echoing old Hollywood leading men. His performance channels the ghost of James Dean with a modern vulnerability, reminding us why he continues to be cast in period films. From Priscilla to Oh, Canada, Elordi seems to exist slightly out of time, a quality that serves On Swift Horses well.

Will Poulter, as the well-meaning but increasingly irrelevant Lee, delivers a quietly tragic turn, while Calle and Calva inject moments of liveliness into a world where silence is often more expressive than speech. Each actor occupies their role with care, though it is Edgar-Jones who anchors the film’s emotional weight with a performance of exquisite restraint.

Too much, too soon

Still, the film isn’t without flaws. On Swift Horses attempts to cover a wide swath of emotional and narrative territory in under two hours, and the result is a story that sometimes leaps too quickly from one beat to another. There’s a yearning for the kind of emotional sprawl found in epics like George Stevens’s Giant, but without the runtime to let feelings fully ripen, the film occasionally asks the audience to take characters’ declarations at face value.

We’re told what people feel, but we don’t always get to see those emotions develop in real time. This is especially true in the film’s second half, where Julius’s and Muriel’s parallel storylines become increasingly fragmented. The narrative momentum stutters just as the stakes should be peaking.

But the ambition behind the film — its attempt to explore queer desire, emotional ambiguity, and existential risk in the hushed tones of a midcentury melodrama — is admirable. It doesn’t flinch from its quiet truths, even if it occasionally gets lost in them.

Love as a wager

Ultimately, On Swift Horses is about what we’re willing to risk in pursuit of connection. Julius bets on cards, on horses, and on the chance that someone might meet him halfway in the dark. Muriel bets on the belief that life can still surprise her. And the film bets on the audience’s patience — with its silence, its ambiguity, and its refusal to tie things neatly into bows.

The title, borrowed from a biblical verse that speaks of fleeing swiftly and in vain, becomes a metaphor for the way desire can both free and doom us. Love, here, is not a reward but a gamble. And though the odds may be stacked, the longing is real.

On Swift Horses may not be a perfect film, but it is a beautiful, ambitious, and achingly human one. It dwells in the liminal space between longing and loss — and in doing so, finds something that feels true.