This Dark Horse is not to be confused with the New Zealand film The Dark Horse, released earlier this month, still less Todd Solondz’s black comedy Dark Horse. This one, subtitled The Incredible True Story of Dream Alliance, is about an actual horse that’s dark, or at least a nice glossy chestnut – making it something of a dark horse among dark-horse films. It’s a good-humoured, no-frills story of a Welsh working-class community that clubbed together to invest in a thoroughbred, and ended up with the winner of the Welsh Grand National.
Their tale has the classic feelgood arc, but it’s also very political, revealing the snobbery directed not just at the owners but at the horse itself – even one of its trainers describes it resembling “a snotty-nosed little comp boy turning up at Eton on his first day”. Community spirit prevails, cheeringly, and it can’t be long before Dream Alliance’s story is fictionalised, Pride-style, with Imelda Staunton as affable spokesperson Jan Vokes. And as the horse? Why, Bill Neighy, obviously.
