Horse Girl (2020)

Horse Girl arrived at Sundance in January 2020 and landed on Netflix a week and a half later, a small psychological drama from Jeff Baena and Alison Brie, who wrote it together while Brie took the lead. Sarah works at a crafts store, keeps a horse, watches supernatural crime shows, and lives with a roommate who means well. Her mother died by suicide. Then the nosebleeds start, the missing time, the dreams of a white room, and a growing conviction that she is a clone, or an abductee, or both. The film declines to settle the question, which is either its courage or its evasion depending on the hour.

Brie plays the unraveling with a commitment that borders on the clinical, and the film treats her delusions with patience instead of pity. This is the closest the movie comes to a social thesis, and it is a modest one: a portrait of mental illness rendered with empathy and without a pamphlet. The cast is white and suburban, the concerns are interior, and nobody stops the plot to explain what it all means. There is no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no historical revision, no identity arithmetic. The camera watches a woman fall apart and asks us to sit with it.

Which leaves us with a film of very low cultural temperature. It is sincere, strange, and stubbornly unresolved, and it refuses the moralizing that would make it legible to a committee. Whether Sarah ascends to a spaceship or simply stops taking her medication is left to us, and the ambiguity is the point. A quiet character piece about a woman, a horse, and a possible abduction. It will not be teaching anyone anything, and it seems at peace with that.