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Horse Girl Movie Review

Horse Girl is a 2020 psychological drama film directed by Jeff Baena and starring Alison Brie. Brie is amazing in this very strange movie.

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“My mom used to say that I have an overactive imagination“

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Sarah, a socially isolated woman with a fondness for arts and crafts, horses, and supernatural crime shows finds her increasingly lucid dreams trickling into her waking life. This was a very strange movie that actually started off as this quirky comedy of sorts, but then it spiraled fully into psychological thriller territory, eventually landing in the dramatic realm.

It’s messy undoubtedly. The movie was too ambiguous for its own sake and the ending was way too questionable in its intentions, but the dramatic elements is where the movie really worked. It explores just how horrifying mental illness is, even more so for the people around the person in question.

The highlight of the movie was seeing the people around Sarah question her behavior and start worrying for her. The movie worked in terms of emotional intensity as I really cared for Sarah due to her excellent character development. She is superbly developed, immensely likable and ultimately it is incredibly hard witnessing what’s happening to her.

Alison Brie is amazing. This performance really deserves more attention among the best of the bunch when it comes to the actress performances of 2020. Fittingly enough, she was in ‘BoJack Horseman’ and here she is playing a girl who likes horses. Never before has she been this terrific as she sold her every emotion and it was just wonderful seeing such an unexpectedly tremendous acting from a lesser-known star.

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Horse Girl would have been so much worse had it not been for her incredible work here. The other characters and actors are significantly less memorable, the dialogue is only okay and thematically speaking, the movie is only slight and not that sophisticated. But emotionally speaking, it worked in spades and in all areas. Whether in suspense or in quirks or in tragedy, the movie was effective in all of these feels. The movie is also very well shot and scored, but the direction and pacing should have been better.

Although Horse Girl is clearly structurally problematic and not as sophisticated in execution as its premise demanded, the movie mostly works as it is effective in all of its suspenseful and also tragic moments. The movie wouldn’t have worked nearly as much had it not been for Alison Brie’s truly remarkable and heartbreaking performance.

My Rating – 3.5