Netflix’s first release out of Sundance, Horse Girl is a quirky comedy turned something much more disturbing.
The idea of the “horse girl” has always been around — that girl we knew in high school who was obsessed with horses — but in the past couple years, the notion of “horse girl energy” came into a meme on the internet. People began wondering what happened to all the horse girls we knew in high school. Those girls with long brown hair held together in a scrunchie and wearing inspirational horse shirts with something like “Ride like the wind” embroidered on it and probably has a bedroom filled with mini horse figurines. Where are those girls today? Still obsessed with horses?
Jeff Baena’s Horse Girl envisions the answer to that question. Alison Brie plays the socially awkward Sarah who spends her days working at a crafts and fabrics store, and her nights binging a cheesy supernatural detective serial called “Purgatory.” Her roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan), comes home with her boyfriend each night to Sarah on the same spot on the couch; what’s refreshing about a roommate character like Nikki is that she doesn’t make fun of Sarah or look down on her, which would’ve been the easy route.
Instead, Nikki has her boyfriend invite his new roommate, Darren (John Reynolds), over for a hangout, and he and Sarah almost immediately hit it off. After we’ve seen Sarah in her pattern of isolated daily life, we see she finally might be breaking out of her shell.
Slowly, though, the script from Baena, and co-written by Brie, starts to peel back the layers of Sarah’s psyche. Still very much a horse girl at heart, Sarah goes to an old horse stable where she visits her old riding horse, Wendy, much to the disdain of the owners there. We learn about her friend who suffered a horrible riding accident that has permanently impaired her.
More than that, we begin entering Sarah’s surreal dreams that drip with dread and sci-fi implications, and we see she sleepwalks, loses track of time in the night, and even begins experiencing lapses in memory. We learn her mother suffered a sad fate due to her depression, and her grandmother suffered from troubling visions and delusions, much like what Sarah starts going through.
As Sarah’s world begins to break down right before our eyes, the movie pivots from quirky rom-com to something much darker, surreal and disturbing. From Baena, who previously directed oddball comedies The Little Hours and Life After Beth, this bait and switch into more sinister territory comes as a surprise.
What’s great is that I would’ve been happy enjoying the version of Horse Girl that we’re given during the first 45 minutes of the movie, about a socially awkward girl just trying to get by. But in a shocking move, on a first date with Darren, Sarah feels comfortable enough with him to talk about cloning and aliens. He jokingly goes along with it like anybody would, until he realizes just how serious she is.
Horse Girl takes a premise based on a joke about horse girls and tips it on its head, as if it’s a condemnation of making fun of the horse girls of the world, like it’s revenge of the horse girl. It’s a genre-bending move from quirky to unsettling that could even impress Parasite‘s Bong Joon Ho, the master of the genre flip.
Allison Brie is perfect in the role as Sarah, giving us wide-eyed wonder with a brewing turmoil beneath the soothing and calm veneer she presents. Molly Shannon is also great as the cheerful and warm work associate at the crafts store.
What Horse Girl ultimately, and most unexpectedly, becomes is a a sorrowful parable about mental illness. It’s about a woman’s battle with loneliness and isolation in a world that doesn’t understand her, and a world she has long given up on understanding herself.
Horse Girl smartly leaves us wondering whether what Sarah’s going through is real or not as ambiguous and focuses its attention on the question of how being misunderstood by society can drive a person mad. This might sound familiar to a movie about a villainous clown that garnered 11 Academy Award nominations. The gag is that this movie handles the same topic in a much more original and sensitive manner and will go under the radar. Perhaps horse girls of the world do deserve a renaissance.