DARK HORSE (Louise Osmond). 85 minutes. Opens Friday (May 20). See listing. Rating: NNN
Louise Osmond’s crowd-pleasing documentary – winner of the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance last year – recounts the tale of Dream Alliance, a racehorse whose triumph at the 2009 Welsh National became a media-friendly Cinderella story.
Owned by a syndicate of friends in the small South Wales town of Blackwood, Dream Alliance won the race after recovering from a potentially career-ending injury. It’s a tale of faith and hope, a nice little story you might hear over an evening at the pub, and Osmond turns that into her hook.
She leaves no sports-documentary box unticked, bolstering every moment of Dark Horse with a manipulative soundtrack and holding her camera on interview subjects until they start to tear up.
It gets the job done well enough, but you’ll be left wondering why the movie doesn’t trust you to appreciate Dream Alliance’s story on your own.
