There is quite a bit to admire about he latest Netflix release, Horse Girl. The greatest of its qualities revolves entirely around Alison Brie’s incredibly accomplished and empathetic performance that carries the film from beginning to end. Brie co-wrote the screenplay with director, Jeff Baena, and in a sense, you can very much tell. It’s the kind of role that is meticulously tuned to provide every opportunity for the star to showcase their range. Brie is more than up to the task playing Sarah, a seemingly awkward and introverted woman who works at a crafts store.
While things seem perfectly normal at first as she converses with her co-worker, Joan (Milly Shannon), and provides helpful advise to customers. But over time, strange things start happening, from odd dreams to waking up in places she shouldn’t be. As the story continues, things begin to escalate, and Sarah starts to believe in things that suggest some otherworldly cause. Subjects like conspiracy theories, alien abductions, and cloning begin to take over her mind as her mental state further deteriorates, sending her down a self-destructive rabbit hole that alienates her from everyone around her.
Brie carries the film very well, having apparently drawn from her grandmother’s struggles with mental health, which serves as an actual plot point in the film since Sarah’s grandmother was a schizophrenic, and Sarah ends up believing she is a clone of her at one point. It’s an ambitious subject to tackle, especially for a production that is so unassuming and rambly in its nature. It touches on trauma, grief, the health care system, and the anxieties that come with knowing there is mental illness in your family history.
Baena does good work in making the film unsettling in these moments where her mental anguish and paranoia begin to take hold. The moments that evoke a sense of surreality feel appropriately surreal and otherworldly. It’s tense when it needs to be, startling when it needs to be, and more importantly, it’s heartbreaking when it needs to be. The dreamy score by Josiah Steinbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman also does a lot of heavy lifting in conveying the strange tonal tightrope that the filmmakers are walking here.
The problem that arises here is that the film seems to lose focus on its central messaging as it goes on. With a misguided need for ambiguity, the film plays coy with what is real and what is just in Sarah’s head, which plays a big part in the film’s third act. Here, the film loses a lot of what grounded the story. It seemed to start reveling in the mental breakdown, finding a weird beauty in it almost. By the time the credits started rolling, I had no idea what the film wanted me to feel. That isn’t inherently a bad thing since stories can be enhanced by filmmakers not clearly expressing how you should react, but in the case of Horse Girl, all posturing ambiguity only served to muddle the message, detracting from the overall experience.
Like I said, there is a lot to admire about Horse Girl. It’s well made, and it touches on some interesting and important topics that are as timely and necessary as ever. The way it handles mental illness is, for the most part, done with incredible sensitivity and care, and obviously coming from an earnest place. Alison Brie does a wonderful job in bringing Sarah to life, creating a soft and timid physicality and presence that can speak volumes without her having to say a word. Unfortunately, like Sarah herself, the film loses its touch as it goes along, and it gets to a point where it practically turns into something else entirely.