Santa Ragione delivers a subversive, sometimes shocking, often funny first-person narrative horror that, while perhaps a little insubstantial, remains an engagingly unconventional exploration of some timely themes.
One thing that’s probably got a bit lost in all the controversy preceding Horses’ release is the fact it’s surprisingly funny. Its humour is pitch black, yes, and its comedic moments often dance on a knife’s edge between laughter and revulsion, but writer and director Andrea Lucco Borlera’s first-person narrative horror – his debut game, created in close collaboration with Saturnalia developer Santa Ragione – is a fascinatingly singular vision. It’s singular enough, in fact, that it’s not an easy thing to effectively describe, but if you can imagine a sort of thematic reinterpretation of Animal Farm by way of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo on one side, and a meme-able Garry’s Mod video on the other, then Horses gleefully oscillates between them, landing somewhere in the middle.
There are moments in Horses that will almost certainly shock – although it’s far from the transgressive, decency shattering work some have supposed it to be – and there are moments so outlandishly, intentionally stupid, the only response is to laugh. And sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the two, Horses’ idiosyncratic approach creating a wilfully disorientating mood. Former film student Borlera’s subversive tale borrows heavily from the language of cinema, his claustrophobic 1.33:1 aspect ratio, stark monochrome colour palette, and dialogue intertitles immediately evoking the silent movie era – with echoes, perhaps, of old newsreel propaganda. Mix in smash cuts, live-action interstitials, split-screen, and picture-in-picture, and the result is a restless, experimental amalgam of unconventional stylistic choices – realistic textures clashing with amateurish, awkwardly animated character models; unnervingly extreme close-ups; an almost complete absence of diegetic sound, replaced instead by the incessant whir of an unseen film projector – whose oppressive, destabilising ambience can’t help but unmoor.
Enter Anselmo, Horses’ blanky naive protagonist and player surrogate, who, on the cusp of his 20th year, is dispatched for 14 days of work on a remote farm. Perhaps, a blunt birthday missive from his father suggests, it’ll be character-building; perhaps it’ll help him “finally start acting like a man”. The world of Horses, we soon learn, is one of moral extremities, exhibiting its own exaggerated framework of societal expectations and norms. And so begins a two week apprenticeship, deep in the Italian countryside, that rapidly takes a troubling turn.
If the avuncular farmer’s firm instructions never to enter his room weren’t enough of a red flag, we soon meet his prized “horses” – naked, filthy humans with rubber masks clamped to their heads, whose atypical nature takes an alarmingly long time to be acknowledged by anyone. It’s an absurd, outlandish image, but also a sympathetic one, their (pixellated) nudity emphasising their dehumanising existence rather than intended for titillation. It’s also an image likely to provoke an immediate emotional response in players. But Anselmo, blank slate that he is, merely pushes on, bound to the inescapable rhythm of the farmer’s strict regime.
Daybreak means breakfast – three cheerfully decorated biscuits cheekily foreshadowing the events to come – then it’s out into the world as the working day begins. Initially, the chores are mundane; you’ll traipse from tool shed to vegetable patch to horse pen and back again, watering crops, feeding the animals, gathering up poop, and whatever else the farmer demands. Occasionally, visitors will come, expounding on the philosophy of Horses’ exterior world before vanishing again, and the day ends with an evening meal, a smattering of conversation, and perhaps a restless night of unsettling visions. But as rebellious forces begin to exert their influence on the farm’s philosophical microcosm, predictable routine succumbs to chaos, and your days – and the farmer’s requirements – grow increasingly extreme.
Vegetable picking and wood chopping give way to burials and beatings, the days only growing weirder and bleaker across Horses’ three-or-so hour runtime. But while Horses’ content warning is expansive – touching on everything from suicide to sexual assault – it’s perhaps also a little misleading, implying an all-out, atrocity filled horror show that never comes. Horses, for all its strange, startling imagery, isn’t that kind of game. It remains darkly whimsical throughout, frequently tempering its horror with humour, and even its most indelible moments stop short of gratuitousness. Yes, it delights in pushing buttons – you’ll gasp, you’ll wince, you’ll almost certainly be lost for words – but it never feels flippant and never tips over into exploitation.
Even so, comfort is clearly not the goal, and Borlera’s approach seems specifically tailored to shake its audience out of a malaise. Horses is far from a subtle game, choosing to paint its themes in broad, bold brushstrokes rather than more deeply interrogating them – as happy to provoke a visceral response as it is an intellectual one. In that regard, it’s a success, albeit perhaps also a fleeting, insubstantial one. And the decision to include simple choices – implying meaningful narrative malleability where there is none – is questionable, occasionally creating awkward moral inconsistencies and distracting contradictions that threaten to muddy the message a little. But still, Horses remains a thoughtful, deliberate work, exploring its themes of oppression and subjugation, and the cycles and systems that perpetuate them, in engagingly unconventional ways.
Sometimes with these kinds of tightly regimented narrative experiences you find yourself asking, what does this story gain from being a game? And if there’s an answer here, it’s perhaps the sense of reluctant complicity and powerlessness that Horses engenders, of ineffectual resistance gradually giving way to something more hopeful. It’s a rallying cry against hypocrisy, institutional or otherwise, and one that feels particularly potent right now, as puritanism and anti-intellectualism continue to exert themselves – and those deemed ‘different’ are increasingly painted as a threat to society. Horses’ approach, its delight in the grotesque, won’t be palatable for everyone – but if it takes a clandestine toolshed blowjob, complete with plastic horsehead wobble, to seed its battle cry for revolution, to make its audience sit up and pay attention, then so be it.
A copy of Horses was provided for this review by Santa Ragione.
