Santa Ragione is a subversive, sometimes shocking, often funny first-person narrative horror that, while perhaps a little tame, remains a compelling, unconventional exploration of some timely themes.
One thing that's probably gotten a little lost in everything controversy Until “Horses” comes out, the fact is that it's surprisingly funny. Yes, its humor is pitch black and its comedic moments often straddle the line between laughter and disgust, but writer-director Andrea Lucco Borlera's first-person narrative horror—his debut game, created in close collaboration with developer Saturnalia Santa Ragione—is a thrillingly unique vision. In fact, it's so unusual that it's not easy to effectively describe, but if you can imagine a sort of thematic reinterpretation of Animal Farm via Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo on one side and the haunting Garry's Mod video on the other, Horses floats gleefully between the two, landing somewhere in the middle.
There are moments in Horses that are almost guaranteed to shock – although it is far from the criminal, decency-destroying work some have suggested – and there are moments so outlandish, willfully stupid, that the only reaction is to laugh. And sometimes it's hard to differentiate between the two: the Horses' idiosyncratic approach creates a deliberately disorienting mood. The subversive story of former film student Borlera borrows heavily from the language of cinema, its claustrophobic 1.33:1 aspect ratio, stark monochrome color palette and dialogue credits immediately reminiscent of the silent film era – perhaps with echoes of old newsreel propaganda. Mix stunning cinematics, live-action sequences, split-screen and picture-in-picture, and the result is a restless, experimental mix of unconventional stylistic choices – realistic textures at odds with amateurish, clunky animated character models; frighteningly extreme close-ups; an almost complete absence of diegetic sound, replaced instead by the incessant whir of an invisible film projector whose oppressive, destabilizing atmosphere cannot help but unsettle.
Enter Anselmo, Horses' dim-witted and naive protagonist and surrogate player who, on the cusp of his 20th birthday, is sent to work on a remote farm for 14 days. Perhaps, as his father's poignant birthday message suggests, it will be character building; perhaps this will help him “finally start acting like a man.” The Horse World, as we soon learn, is a world of moral extremes, exhibiting its own exaggerated limits of social expectations and norms. Thus begins a two-week training session in the depths of the Italian countryside that quickly takes an alarming turn.
If the good-natured farmer's firm instructions to never enter his room weren't enough of a red flag, we soon meet his prized “horses” – naked, dirty people with rubber masks attached to their heads, whose atypical nature takes an alarmingly long time to be recognized by anyone. It's an absurd, outlandish image, but also cute: their (pixelated) nudity emphasizes their inhuman existence rather than being intended to titillate. This image can also evoke an immediate emotional response in players. But Anselmo, like a blank slate, simply moves forward, tied to the inescapable rhythm of a strict farm regime.
Dawn means breakfast – three cheerfully decorated cookies, cheekily foreshadowing things to come – and then he goes out into the world as the workday begins. At first, housework is routine; you'll move from the tool shed to the vegetable garden to the horse pen and back again, watering the crops, feeding the animals, collecting feces and doing whatever the farmer requires. Visitors arrive from time to time, expounding the Horses' philosophy on the outer world before disappearing again, and the day ends with dinner, a little conversation, and perhaps a restless night of disturbing visions. But as rebel forces begin to exert their influence on the farm's philosophical microcosm, predictable routine gives way to chaos and your days—and the farmer's demands—become increasingly extreme.
Gathering vegetables and chopping wood gives way to burials and beatings, and the days become increasingly strange and gloomy throughout the three hours of “Horses.” But while the content warning for Horses is broad—it touches on everything from suicide to sexual assault—it's perhaps also a little misleading, implying an all-out, atrocity-filled horror show that will never happen. Horses, for all their strange and amazing appearances, are not that kind of game. It remains darkly whimsical throughout, often tempering its horror with humor, and even its most memorable moments are far from gratuitous. Yes, it delights in pushing buttons—you'll gasp, you'll wince, you'll almost certainly be speechless—but it never feels frivolous and never leans toward exploitation.
Despite this, comfort is clearly not the goal, and Borlera's approach seems specifically designed to move his audience out of discomfort. Horses are far from a subtle gamer, preferring to paint their themes with broad, bold strokes rather than explore them more deeply – they are happy to evoke both a visceral response and an intellectual one. In this regard, it is a success, although perhaps fleeting and insignificant. And the decision to include simple choices that imply meaningful narrative flexibility where there is none is questionable, sometimes creating awkward moral incongruities and distracting contradictions that threaten to muddy the message a bit. But nonetheless, Horses remains a thoughtful, thoughtful work that explores themes of oppression and enslavement, and the cycles and systems that perpetuate them, in fascinatingly unconventional ways.
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Sometimes when you watch these kinds of highly regimented narrative events, you wonder: What does this story gain from being a game? And if there is an answer here, then perhaps it is the feeling of forced complicity and powerlessness that the Horse generates, an ineffective resistance that gradually gives way to something more hopeful. It's a rallying cry against hypocrisy, institutional or otherwise, and it seems especially powerful right now, as puritanism and anti-intellectualism continue to surface and those considered “different” are increasingly portrayed as a threat to society. The approach of the horses, their delight in the grotesque, won't be everyone's cup of tea – but if it takes a secret blowjob in a barn with plastic head bobs to evoke the battle cry of revolution, to make the audience sit up and take notice, then so be it.
A copy of “The Horse” was provided for this review by Santa Ragione.
