Adam Hursey’s review published on Letterboxd:
I'm very late to the discussion of this one. These days, I'm either very early from seeing it at a film festival, or very late by the time I get around to it once it shows up on whatever streaming option on which it lands.
I see two potential discussion paths for this film:
1. The film is about exploitation. There is plenty to go around, from the latest Haywood generation exploiting their great-great-great grandfather's notoriety, to the exploitation of animals (horses in this case) in general, to the exploitation of children for entertainment purposes, to the exploitation of a tragic experience (even if they are our own tragedies), to the exploitation of whatever we can get our hands on in order to turn a quick buck.
2. Jordan Peele wanted to make a Spielbergian sci-fi spectacle and wants to poke fun at people who try to find deep meaning in an old-fashioned monster movie.
It could go either way really.
For me, the movie keeps moving at a nice pace that kept me constantly engaged for most of the run time. All of the stuff involving Gordy is A+ stuff. I want that movie. By the end, I didn't really care what happened to our characters though. It just did not quite coalesce for me overall. But it looks like I'm in the minority here. Maybe it needed the theatrical experience after all. But, to me, it felt like something more akin to Super 8, another Spielbergian homage, than an original work from a major auteur.
