On Swift Horses is a sweeping romantic drama set against the sun-bleached landscapes of 1950s Kansas and Las Vegas, adapted by director Daniel Minahan from Shannon Pufahl's acclaimed debut novel. At its center is Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a young woman newly married to Lee (Will Poulter) who forms an unexpected bond with Julius (Jacob Elordi), Lee's restless younger brother. When Julius heads west to Las Vegas with dreams of fortune, Muriel finds herself drawn after him in spirit — and eventually in fact — as the boundaries of her suburban life dissolve against the heat of a decade defined by conformity and suppressed desire.

The film is simultaneously a story of queer longing and a meditation on the price of belonging. Muriel and Julius are kindred spirits — each concealing a self that 1950s America has no language for, each gambling their futures on something the world refuses to validate. Minahan's direction captures the period with atmospheric precision, drawing from the visual idiom of classic American cinema while allowing the story's emotional and erotic currents to run close to the surface. Diego Calva and Sasha Calle round out an ensemble that complicates the film's central triangle with depth and moral weight.

On Swift Horses premiered at SXSW 2025 as one of the year's most admired works of literary adaptation — quiet where other films shout, devastatingly precise in its portrait of lives lived in the margins of their own time. Based on a novel that NPR called "a brilliant debut," the film honors both its source and the generation of Americans whose loves and identities went unnamed. It is a film about freedom and its costs, rendered with uncommon beauty and enormous feeling.