FNC 2026: Wild Horse Nine

 

FNC 2026 / Wild Horse Nine trailer

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Wild Horse Nine: At the End of the World, the Men Who Made It Worse

There are films that use a landscape as a backdrop, and films that discover in a landscape a way of thinking. Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, set partly on the remote, elemental terrain of Easter Island, belongs uneasily and magnificently to the latter category. The island’s volcanic contours, vast Pacific horizons, saturated colours, and monumental stone figures offer something more than visual splendour: they establish a geography of moral isolation, a place where the world’s political machinery seems impossibly distant and yet its consequences remain everywhere. Against this extraordinary setting, McDonagh stages an encounter between two American intelligence operatives who have spent their lives manipulating history and now find themselves unable to escape its accumulated wreckage. Featuring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell at their most compellingly combustible, the film is a dark comedy about complicity, mortality, male friendship, and the absurd human appetite for absolution. It is also a film of productive contradictions, whose visual poetry and extraordinary performances occasionally expose the limits of its own satirical imagination.

Set in 1973, in the shadow of the Chilean coup that would overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Wild Horse Nine follows two veteran CIA agents whose professional lives have been shaped by the discreet manufacture of political catastrophe. Chris Carlisle, played by Malkovich, is a dying operative whose terminal cancer, intermittent forgetfulness, and long-cultivated contempt for ordinary morality have begun to disturb the equilibrium of his cynicism. His companion, Lee Chesterfield, embodied by Rockwell with an affecting combination of patience and melancholy, is charged with keeping his increasingly indiscreet partner from revealing secrets that powerful men would prefer to leave buried. Their journey from Santiago to Easter Island is ostensibly a respite from espionage, but the farther they travel from the machinery of American power, the more insistently its moral consequences follow. McDonagh understands that geographical escape is not the same as spiritual departure. One can cross an ocean without ever leaving the country one has made of oneself.

The film’s central achievement is the relationship between its two protagonists, a friendship so deeply embedded in shared experience that neither man possesses the emotional vocabulary to acknowledge its tenderness. McDonagh has long been fascinated by men who communicate affection through provocation, cruelty, and elaborate verbal evasions; here, that familiar preoccupation acquires a more sombre dimension. Carlisle and Chesterfield have spent decades discussing the practicalities of killing without seriously interrogating the morality of the act. Their conversations turn upon the etiquette of assassination, the peculiarities of national character, the deficiencies of American cheese, and the theological absurdities that arise when men accustomed to dispensing death begin contemplating their own. Their humour is not a refuge from their history but one of its instruments. The joke allows them to approach the truth without having to remain in its presence for too long.

Malkovich gives Carlisle a performance of exquisite, unnerving precision. His delivery, with its extravagant enunciation and leisurely contempt, transforms even the most grotesque observations into miniature theatrical events. Beneath the character’s cultivated intellectual superiority, however, lies a man whose certainty has begun to fracture. His terminal illness has not made him virtuous; it has merely rendered the old arrangements between conscience and denial less dependable. He records his thoughts on a dictaphone, ostensibly preparing a memoir, while his recollections drift between geopolitical atrocities, private grievances, and eccentric meditations on moths. Once indifferent to the suffering of others, Carlisle has begun escorting insects outside rather than killing them. The gesture is absurdly small beside his history of violence, and McDonagh wisely allows it to remain so. Yet this new solicitude suggests the possibility that conscience may return not as a revelation but as an embarrassing, almost involuntary tenderness toward life.

Rockwell supplies the film’s essential counterweight. Where Malkovich makes cynicism theatrical, Rockwell makes it weary. His Lee is less flamboyantly nihilistic, more attentive to the emotional obligations that his partner has spent a lifetime evading. Their chemistry is remarkable precisely because it does not depend upon sentimentality. Lee’s exasperation contains devotion; his restraint conceals a grief he cannot quite formulate. He has been entrusted with Carlisle’s final wish, a request that forces their friendship into the uncomfortable territory where loyalty and moral responsibility cease to be interchangeable. Rockwell understands that the character’s deepest conflict is not simply whether to obey his companion, but whether love can remain love when it is asked to participate in another person’s destruction. Together, the actors make the film’s philosophical questions intimate, giving metaphysical weight to pauses, interruptions, and arguments that seem, on the surface, gloriously ridiculous.

Easter Island provides the film with its most arresting visual and symbolic resource. Its immense stone figures, the moai, stand as mute witnesses to histories that exceed the comprehension of passing visitors. The surrounding landscape, alternately austere and astonishingly vivid, offers a striking counterpoint to the cramped moral universe inhabited by McDonagh’s Americans. The men arrive expecting distance, perhaps even transcendence; instead, the island becomes a mirror in which their smallness is newly visible. Nature does not absolve them, and beauty offers no automatic consolation. The Pacific horizon may suggest infinity, but the past remains stubbornly human. In the film’s most resonant visual passages, the contrast between the island’s grandeur and the protagonists’ verbal pettiness produces an almost tragic irony: these men have participated in the remaking of nations, yet cannot settle the elementary questions of what they owe the dead, one another, or themselves.

McDonagh’s dialogue remains a formidable pleasure. His characters speak in barbed, digressive exchanges whose comic rhythms recall the theatre of Samuel Beckett, where language becomes both a defence against despair and evidence of its persistence. A conversation may wander through religion, race, American imperialism, or the culinary indignities of national identity before suddenly revealing a wound beneath the wit. Steve Buscemi, as the anxious intelligence superior attempting to contain the damage, adds another finely calibrated performance to the ensemble. The arrival of two young Chilean left-wing students, Monica and Alicia, introduces a generational contrast between those who still believe political conviction can change the world and those who have made careers out of ensuring that it does not. Yet the film gives these women comparatively little interior life, too often positioning them as instruments of male revelation rather than fully realised participants in the historical and moral drama. This imbalance diminishes the film’s perspective, particularly when its critique of power might have benefited from the voices of those most directly threatened by it.

More troubling is McDonagh’s treatment of the historical atrocities that underpin the narrative. The CIA’s involvement in efforts to undermine Allende’s government belongs to the documented history of American intervention in Latin America; the film’s references to other covert operations likewise invoke consequences that extend far beyond the private regrets of its fictional agents. McDonagh’s irreverence can illuminate the grotesque distance between bureaucratic language and human suffering, exposing how easily violence becomes a professional accomplishment. At other moments, however, his appetite for the perfectly sharpened punchline threatens to reduce historical catastrophe to an opportunity for mordant entertainment. The problem is not that political horror must be approached solemnly, but that comedy requires an awareness of where its moral weight falls. When the perpetrators receive the richest dialogue, the most complicated emotions, and the most generous opportunities for redemption, the victims risk becoming scenery in somebody else’s reckoning.

This tension prevents Wild Horse Nine from achieving the sustained tragicomic perfection of McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, though the comparison also clarifies what makes the newer film distinctive. Its ambitions are broader, its historical burden heavier, and its sympathies more compromised. McDonagh is drawn to the possibility that even terrible men might experience a final awakening, that a flicker of compassion might matter even when it cannot repair the damage already done. The idea is emotionally persuasive but ethically precarious. Redemption cannot mean that remorse erases responsibility, or that the dying conscience of a perpetrator matters more than the lives destroyed by his actions. The film is strongest when it leaves this contradiction unresolved, allowing its characters to search for grace without pretending they have earned it.

Ultimately, Wild Horse Nine is a beautiful, unsettling, imperfect film whose greatest pleasures emerge from the collision between extraordinary performances, an unforgettable landscape, and questions that refuse to yield comfortable answers. Malkovich and Rockwell lend genuine emotional substance to a friendship expressed almost entirely through insults, evasions, and shared complicity. Easter Island gives their journey a visual majesty that their private philosophies cannot diminish, while McDonagh’s mordant intelligence keeps mortality from becoming merely solemn. Yet the film’s final challenge is not whether its two men can find peace before death, but whether peace, for men like these, can ever be separated from the reckoning they have avoided. The island remains indifferent; the statues do not pronounce judgment. The ocean simply continues beyond the limits of vision. What remains is the uncomfortable possibility that a man may learn to spare a moth after helping to destroy lives, and that this small mercy can be both genuinely moving and grotesquely insufficient. In that contradiction lies the film’s deepest achievement: its recognition that the human desire for forgiveness is most compelling precisely when forgiveness is not ours to give.

The movie hits theatres this November 6.

LENA GHIO   

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FNC 2026 : Rose

FNC 2026 / Rose

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The Freedom of Trousers: Sandra Hüller and the Quiet Revolt of Rose

There are films that announce their politics with the urgency of a manifesto, and others that allow an entire social order to incriminate itself. Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an austere, quietly audacious historical drama starring Sandra Hüller, belongs to the latter category. Set in the bruised aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, this monochrome parable follows a battle-scarred soldier who arrives in a remote German village claiming an inheritance, concealing a truth that the film’s audience recognizes almost immediately: beneath the coarse clothing, weathered face, and assumed masculinity is a woman determined to live according to her own calculations of freedom. What follows is at once a darkly comic social experiment, a study of survival under patriarchal rule, and a tragedy whose emotional force derives from its refusal to confuse rebellion with triumph. Schleinzer does not merely revisit history; he discovers within its cruelties an unsettling portrait of the present.

Hüller’s Rose is a creation of extraordinary physical intelligence. Her body seems to have learned the economy of military life: the economical stride, the guarded shoulders, the deliberate stillness of someone who has survived by making herself difficult to read. A wound disfigures her face, giving her an appearance that unsettles the villagers while suggesting the more intimate injuries of a life spent negotiating hostile circumstances. Hüller, whose performances in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest established her formidable command of moral ambiguity, works here through an even more radical restraint. She never turns Rose into a theatrical puzzle or a contemporary emblem wearing historical costume. Instead, she makes the character’s silences active, her glances consequential, and her occasional eruptions of anger startling precisely because they emerge from such disciplined composure. Every gesture seems to contain a decision; every withheld expression preserves a little territory that the world has not yet conquered.

The premise has the deceptively clean architecture of a folktale. After years of soldiering, Rose enters a devout Protestant community and claims to be the rightful heir to a neglected farmhouse. The villagers regard this strange, taciturn newcomer with suspicion, but labor, religious observance, money, and a talent for practical usefulness gradually earn their acceptance. Rose repairs the property, employs workers, and establishes herself as a respectable man of means. Her most consequential acquisition, however, arrives through marriage. A neighboring farmer offers his eldest daughter, Suzanna, in a transaction that binds land and woman together with the unembarrassed efficiency of an economic contract. Rose accepts. The irony is merciless: having escaped the restrictions imposed on women, she must enter the institution that most conspicuously reproduces them in order to preserve her escape.

“There is more freedom in trousers,” Rose explains, adding that trousers are merely a piece of cloth. The apparent simplicity of this observation conceals the film’s governing paradox. Clothing is material, but its social consequences are immense; a garment becomes a passport, an alibi, and a declaration of independence. Rose’s disguise is hardly convincing to the audience, yet the community’s willingness to accept it reveals how thoroughly perception has been organized by expectation. The villagers see a man because the structures of their world instruct them to recognize authority in masculine appearance. A woman may labor, possess property, and exercise intelligence, but these qualities acquire public legitimacy only when attributed to a male body. Schleinzer’s sharpest joke is therefore also his most devastating argument: gender is not simply something Rose performs. It is a hierarchy that everyone else is performing alongside her, often without recognizing the part.

Schleinzer, who previously explored the brutal manufacture of social identities in Michael and the historical construction of racial otherness in Angelo, brings to Rose a filmmaker’s instinct for the grotesque hiding inside respectable convention. His background as a casting director is evident in the village’s peculiar human topography. Faces seem carved by suspicion, bodies carry the accumulated habits of deprivation, and communal rituals possess the solemn absurdity of ceremonies whose participants have forgotten their original purpose. Yet the film’s humor never becomes a comfortable escape from its historical severity. It emerges in the gap between what the villagers believe and what the audience knows, in the practical improvisations demanded by Rose’s domestic arrangements, and in the extraordinary elasticity of a society prepared to overlook almost anything so long as its prescribed appearances remain intact. The laughter catches in the throat because the joke is never merely on the villagers. It is on the systems that make their blindness useful.

The marriage introduces the film’s most delicate complication. Suzanna, played with disarming precision by Caro Braun, initially appears the embodiment of dutiful submission: young, awkward, and prepared to accept the future selected for her. But Braun gradually reveals an intelligence that the character’s social position has trained her to conceal. Her responses become less predictable, and the relationship between husband and wife acquires a cautious tenderness that neither the institution of marriage nor Rose’s original calculations can adequately explain. When a baby unexpectedly enters their lives, the household settles into an arrangement that appears to satisfy everyone. The village recognizes the family it expects to see; Suzanna finds a measure of intimacy; Rose approaches something resembling domestic peace. Yet the arrangement remains precarious, sustained by a collective willingness not to examine too closely what makes it possible. Schleinzer allows affection to develop without forcing it into a convenient declaration about sexuality or identity. Rose’s inner life remains resistant to easy classification, and the film is stronger for leaving that resistance intact.

This ambiguity is essential to the film’s distinction between self-determination and modern identity politics. Rose does not offer a neat vocabulary for understanding herself, nor does the narrative demand that she fit a contemporary category. Her explanation is practical rather than doctrinal: trousers provide freedom, and freedom is worth the deception required to obtain it. Such pragmatism should not be mistaken for emotional simplicity. Rose’s choices arise from a world in which survival often requires compromise, and in which the desire to live unmolested can be more urgent than the desire to be understood. The film’s historical distance permits no easy analogy, but its central question travels readily across centuries: what does authenticity mean when the price of openly inhabiting oneself is exclusion, dispossession, or death? Schleinzer offers no consoling answer. He understands that liberation can begin as an expedient arrangement, and that a life constructed around concealment may nevertheless contain genuine dignity, tenderness, and self-knowledge.

Formally, Rose achieves an uncommon unity between its subject and its style. Cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz renders the countryside in black and white, transforming timber, mud, weathered skin, and bleak expanses of land into a visual world suspended between historical document and nightmare. The images possess a severity reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer, but their precision is never merely devotional. Faces emerge from darkness like evidence reluctantly brought to light; the landscape seems less a pastoral refuge than a witness to the social violence embedded within it. Production and costume design deepen the illusion of material antiquity, giving every worn surface the authority of something that has endured rather than been decorated. Hansjörg Weißbrich’s editing pares the narrative to approximately 93 minutes, allowing the story to tighten without becoming mechanical. Tara Nome Doyle’s spare vocal music, meanwhile, introduces a strain of almost unearthly lament, articulating an anguish that Rose’s guarded body refuses to express. The film’s craftsmanship is so exact that its silences feel composed rather than empty.

The narration, delivered by Marisa Growaldt in a measured, faintly academic voice, adds another layer of productive uncertainty. It offers access to Rose’s circumstances without pretending to unlock her completely. This distance prevents the film from collapsing into psychological explanation, preserving a tension between the individual’s unknowable interior and the public narratives imposed upon her. The approach occasionally risks emotional frigidity, and Schleinzer’s insistence on formal control can make the machinery of the parable visible. But the restraint proves especially powerful when the story approaches its devastating conclusion. Having allowed its improbable domestic arrangement to acquire warmth and apparent stability, the film refuses to mistake temporary accommodation for lasting safety. The final movement arrives not as a sensational reversal but as the return of historical reality, with all its punitive indifference. Schleinzer’s refusal to sentimentalize the consequences gives the ending its terrible composure.

At the center of Rose is a distinction between being accepted and being free. The villagers may welcome Rose as long as she fulfills the obligations attached to her assumed identity, but their approval cannot abolish the conditions that made her disguise necessary. Her apparent success exposes the fragility of a social order that confuses convention with nature and obedience with virtue. In this respect, the film’s politics are more penetrating than an uncomplicated celebration of defiance would have been. Rose does not overthrow the system; she discovers a narrow passage through it, then attempts to build a life inside the space she has won. That the passage eventually closes does not invalidate the freedom experienced along the way. It makes the cost of that freedom visible.

With Rose, Schleinzer confirms his place among the most uncompromising formalists working in contemporary European cinema, while Hüller delivers a performance whose greatness lies in how little it demands to be admired. Together, they transform an obscure historical premise into a work of rare moral and cinematic concentration. The film’s achievement is not that it makes the past resemble the present, but that it reveals how stubbornly certain arrangements of power survive changes in costume, language, and law. Rose’s trousers are only cloth, after all. The world’s response to them is the tragedy. And within that tragedy, Hüller finds something that no social order can entirely confiscate: the fierce, unadvertised dignity of a person who has decided, against the available evidence, to live.

ROSE

STARRING SANDRA HÜLLER Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the 76th Berlinale Silver Medallion Recipient at 53rd Telluride Film Festival DIRECTED BY MARKUS SCHLEINZER

Now on MUBI

LENA GHIO   

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The Architecture of Betrayal • On power, conscience, and the possibility of a different future •Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and us

Image created by META October 13, 2026 2:12 pm edt

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There are moments when the fate of an institution appears to rest on a decision made in a room from which almost everyone has been excluded. A signature is withheld. An alliance is broken. A powerful man changes sides, perhaps believing that the arrangement he abandons can be sacrificed without consequence. Far from that room, people continue to arrive at work, customers continue to place their trust in familiar names, and families continue to depend on the fragile machinery of  countries whose future they cannot control. The decision belongs to a handful of people. Its consequences may belong to millions.

It is against this disproportion between executive power and public consequence that the present story must be read. The astrology and tarot assembled around three chief executives—one who betrays, one who is betrayed, and a third, more powerful figure alleged to stand behind the original corruption—offer not a verdict on identifiable individuals, but a symbolic drama of authority, complicity, endurance, and accountability. Their value lies less in predicting the next headline than in illuminating the human patterns through which institutions rise, become compromised, and sometimes discover the possibility of renewal.

The final cards are Eight of Swords, the Hierophant, the Magician, and Three of Wands. Taken together, they suggest a passage from constraint through the institutions that define the rules, toward the recovery of agency and a horizon extending beyond the present crisis. It is not an uncomplicated story of triumph. Its hope is more demanding: the possibility that people who have been made to feel powerless can recover the capacity to shape what happens next.

Tarot illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith, circa 1909–1910;public-domain images via Wikimedia Commons.

I. The Prison of the Possible

The Eight of Swords opens the final reading with an image of confinement. In the traditional card, a blindfolded woman stands bound among eight swords, her movements apparently restricted. Yet the swords do not form an entirely closed enclosure. The landscape beyond them remains visible; the possibility of movement exists, though the figure cannot easily perceive it.

This is the psychology of a crisis in which the consequences appear larger than the available choices. For the betrayed executive, Zelensky, whose country's survival is understood to be at stake, the predicament is especially severe. Capital, contracts, commercial relationships, and the livelihoods of people may be exposed to decisions made elsewhere. Even an accomplished leader can discover that the instruments through which he once exercised control have become insufficient.

The card does not diminish the material reality of such a predicament. A country facing insolvency cannot be rescued by a change of perspective alone, and people cannot pay their bills with metaphors. The Eight of Swords instead captures the additional burden imposed by uncertainty: the moment when every available route seems compromised, when the mind begins to mistake the present arrangement for an immutable future.

There is a wider public dimension to this image. Millions of people depend on institutions they neither own nor govern. They may have little influence over the leaders who determine whether a country remains free, whether an essential service continues, or whether an environmental risk is adequately addressed. Their vulnerability is not imaginary. But neither does it follow that those who exercise power possess unlimited freedom, or that the public has no means of demanding change.

The first task, then, is to distinguish genuine constraints from the belief that nothing can be done. The blindfold must be removed before the landscape can be assessed. In practical terms, that means identifying what remains viable, which commitments can be enforced, which relationships can be rebuilt, and where intervention is still possible. Hope begins not by denying the walls, but by discovering where they end.

Tarot illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith, circa 1909–1910;public-domain images via Wikimedia Commons.

II. The Cathedral of Authority

The second card, the Hierophant, introduces a different kind of power: the authority of institutions, traditions, rules, and collective belief. Where the Eight of Swords portrays an individual trapped within circumstances, the Hierophant represents the structures that establish what is legitimate and what is permitted.

In the present drama, those structures are ambiguous. They may preserve a compromised order, protecting influential people behind the language of procedure and established practice. But they may also provide the means by which that order is challenged. Boards, courts, regulators, professional standards, public reporting, and the obligations attached to political governance can become instruments of accountability when they operate independently and transparently.

The Hierophant asks a question more consequential than whether a powerful person will lose his position: what gives that position legitimacy in the first place?

A title is not the same as moral authority. Longevity is not proof of sound judgment. An alliance is not evidence of integrity. Countries acquire their standing through the obligations they fulfill, the standards they uphold, and the people they protect. When those obligations are neglected, procedure can become a shelter for privilege rather than a framework for public trust.

The card also warns against the comforting fantasy that the removal of one individual automatically repairs a damaged system. A succession can change the occupant of an office without changing the incentives that produced the crisis. A new executive may inherit the same dependencies, the same opaque arrangements, and the same pressure to place short-term advantage above long-term responsibility. Genuine reform requires more than a different face at the head of the table. It requires an examination of the table itself.

Here, the Hierophant offers a restrained but important form of hope. Institutions can be corrected when their rules are made meaningful, their decisions scrutinized, and their obligations enforced. Accountability need not depend on a dramatic confession or a single heroic intervention. It can emerge from the less glamorous work of evidence, oversight, independent judgment, and rules that apply regardless of rank.

Tarot illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith, circa 1909–1910;public-domain images via Wikimedia Commons.

III. The Return of the Magician

Then comes the Magician.

In the earlier reading for the betrayed Zelensky, this card marked the transition from the Hanged Man's suspension to active resourcefulness. Its appearance again in the final judgment gives that transition a wider significance. The Magician is the figure who discovers that the available instruments, however imperfect, can still be assembled into something useful.

His table holds the familiar emblems of the tarot's four suits: the resources of the material world, the force of intention, the power of thought, and the capacity to build relationships. The image is not one of miraculous rescue. It is one of coordination. Potential becomes consequential only when separate elements are brought together and directed toward a purpose.

For a country in danger, this might mean finding alternative financing, negotiating with enemies, retaining essential allies, preserving technical expertise, or developing an operating model less dependent on a compromised alliance. It might mean communicating honestly with the people rather than asking them to survive on assurances. It might mean assembling the documentation necessary to establish responsibility, contest an unlawful decision, or persuade others that a viable future remains possible.

The Magician is particularly significant because he follows the Hierophant. Individual ingenuity and institutional accountability are not necessarily opposing forces. A resourceful leader may need formal processes to protect the country, while those processes may require determined individuals willing to activate them. Neither good intentions nor rules are sufficient in isolation. Their power lies in their combination.

There is, however, a shadow to the Magician. He is also an illusionist, a master of attention who can make one thing appear to be another. The same talents that enable recovery can be used to manipulate a narrative, manufacture confidence, or disguise an absence of substance. In a crisis, eloquence is easily mistaken for a plan, and spectacle for change.

The decisive test is therefore material. Does the strategy protect the people whose livelihoods are threatened? Does it reduce the company's exposure to future shocks? Does it confront the source of the damage, or merely reposition it? The Magician deserves our confidence only when his gestures produce consequences beyond the performance itself.

Tarot illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith, circa 1909–1910;public-domain images via Wikimedia Commons.

IV. The Men and the Cards

Seen alongside the earlier spreads, the final reading acquires the shape of a complicated portrait.

The betraying executive, Donald Trump,  received the Emperor, the Four of Cups, and the Lovers. The sequence suggested a pursuit of authority, the possibility of dissatisfaction with what that authority delivers, and a consequential alliance. The Emperor seeks to command the structure; the Lovers asks what must be chosen, and which loyalties are sacrificed in the process. Between them, the Four of Cups raises the possibility that an apparent gain may not provide the satisfaction or security anticipated.

The betrayed executive, Volodymyr Zelensky,  received the Hanged Man, the Magician, and Judgement, followed by the Four of Cups, the Lovers, and the Emperor. His sequence moves from suspension through resourcefulness and reckoning toward the possibility of restored order. Where the first executive's reading begins with control, the second's ends with it. Symbolically, this is the difference between preserving power and rebuilding the conditions under which power can be exercised effectively.

The third figure, Vladimir Putin, described as the original source of corruption, received the Three of Cups, the Seven of Pentacles, and the Hermit. The movement is from a network of shared interests to an assessment of results, then toward withdrawal or isolation. In light of rumors concerning his health and possible challenges to his leadership, the Hermit may evoke a retreat from the center of power. Yet the cards cannot verify those rumors, diagnose cognitive decline, or establish that anyone is planning a removal. They permit a reading of the situation's themes, not a factual conclusion about events behind closed doors.

What binds the three portraits is the unstable relationship between power and dependence. The first executive seeks an advantageous alliance. The second must discover whether other people will stand with him. The third occupies a network whose cohesion may depend on interests that change over time. None is entirely independent of the relationships through which authority is exercised.

And this is where the story moves beyond the men themselves. Employees, customers, communities, and people exposed to environmental harm are not merely supporting characters in a drama of executive rivalry. They are the people for whom the consequences matter most. A change of leadership that leaves them exposed is not a meaningful resolution. A business recovery that preserves profitability while ignoring preventable harm is not a complete victory. The measure of a new chapter must be found in the lives it makes safer and more secure.

V. Three Wands on the Horizon

The final card is the Three of Wands, and its horizon offers a fitting conclusion.

A figure stands looking outward over the water, watching ships move toward distant shores. The immediate work has been done; now the question is what can be built from it. The card evokes expansion, planning, trade, and a future that depends on decisions made before all the results are known.

After the Eight of Swords, this horizon matters. The opening card describes a world in which choices appear to have disappeared. The closing card restores distance and perspective. There are destinations beyond the immediate crisis, relationships beyond the compromised alliance, and possibilities that cannot be seen while all attention is fixed on the person who caused the damage.

The Three of Wands does not promise that the ships will arrive on schedule. It asks whether someone is preparing for their arrival. In the context of the company's survival, hope requires a credible plan: a defensible financial position, diversified relationships, responsible environmental practices, and a commitment to the people whose work sustains the country/enterprise. It also requires acknowledging the possibility that the country may need to change fundamentally to survive.

For the wider public, the horizon is larger still. It includes institutions capable of acting before harm becomes irreversible, governance that does not confuse influence with immunity, and systems in which the cost of irresponsible decisions cannot simply be transferred to citizens/workers, customers, or vulnerable communities. These are not achievements foretold by the stars. They are choices that societies can make.

The astrology surrounding the three figures reinforces the same tension between disruption and possibility. Pluto's challenging relationship to Putin's Ascendant evokes a struggle over power and identity; Uranus in Zelensky's longer-term chart symbolizes reinvention; Jupiter's prominence in Trump's and Putin's charts raises the question of public visibility and ambition. These symbols do not establish who will prevail. They describe the atmosphere of a story in which old arrangements are under pressure and the future remains contested.

Perhaps that is the most honest meaning of the final judgment. The Eight of Swords acknowledges how frighteningly narrow the present can become. The Hierophant insists that authority must answer to something beyond itself. The Magician restores the possibility of purposeful action. And the Three of Wands directs our attention beyond the immediate confrontation, toward the world that will be built in its aftermath.

Hope, in this reading, is neither a prediction of revenge nor the promise that justice will arrive of its own accord. It is the conviction that a compromised arrangement need not become a permanent condition; that institutions can be made to serve the people who depend on them; and that the future remains open to those willing to work for it.

The ships are still on the horizon. Their arrival is uncertain. What matters now is whether those with the capacity to act will prepare for a future worthy of the people who have so much at stake in it.

Epilogue: The Man Who Must Rebuild

Of the three men caught in this drama of power, betrayal, and consequence, it is Zelensky whose cards offer the most compelling vision of a future reclaimed. Not because the universe has promised him victory, nor because suffering confers an automatic right to prevail, but because his sequence describes something more durable than the possession of power: the capacity to recover it after everything familiar has been thrown into doubt.

The Hanged Man begins his story in suspension, caught between what has been lost and what remains possible. The Magician follows, transforming helplessness into action. Judgement brings the prospect of reckoning, a moment when the past must be confronted and the future reconsidered. The Emperor, appearing at the end of his personal sequence, offers the possibility of order restored—not through the simple reversal of fortune, but through the difficult reconstruction of authority. And beyond them, in the final judgment, the Three of Wands opens the horizon.

The other two men inhabit different landscapes. Trump's Emperor, Four of Cups, and Lovers suggest that power and advantageous alliances may come at the price of deeper satisfaction or enduring trust. Putin's Three of Cups, Seven of Pentacles, and Hermit trace a movement from collective interests through a period of evaluation toward withdrawal. Neither sequence establishes defeat. Both, however, leave questions that  Zelensky's reading answers with a more expansive possibility: what can be built after the rupture?

Ultimately, the greatest victory would not be to see one powerful man diminished while another takes his place. It would be to preserve a viable enterprise, protect the people whose livelihoods depend on it, and ensure that responsibility cannot be evaded through influence or private arrangements.

The stars offer symbols, not guarantees. The cards offer a narrative, not a verdict. Yet their final image is worth keeping: a figure looking toward distant shores, understanding that the horizon is not a promise but an invitation.

Of the three, Zelensky's story carries the strongest symbolism of renewal. Whether he can fulfill it will depend on what he does next—and on whether those with the power to help choose to stand with him.

LENA GHIO   

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