That Moment In ‘Blade Runner 2049’ When K Finds The Horse

THE STORY: Set thirty years after the first film, replicants – bioengineered humans – are slaves, with K (Ryan Gosling) a replicant working for police in Los Angeles as a ‘blade runner,’ a cop who hunts and kills rogue replicants. On a job one day, he learns of a troubling secret, that a replicant actually had a baby, something they aren’t thought able to do, and when his superior finds out, puts him on a mission to find and eradicate the child in hopes of stopping a war, though this becomes a tragic journey of discovery about himself and a man who decades before set the whole thing in motion.

THE RUNDOWN: One of the greatest sequels ever made, this astonishing achievement from director Denis Villeneuve earned high praise from critics but was unfortunately a huge box office bomb, with audiences simply not having the patience for the filmmakers’ creative and slow-burn vision. It’s too bad because this is easily the best film of that year and despite my early apprehensions, is a monumental cinematic experience on par with and even surpassing the original, a thinking-person’s movie that should be considered one the best ever made in the genre.

THAT MOMENT (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD THAT REVEAL KEY STORY ELEMENTS): K is a slave. Not the kind of slave in a conventional sense, but a slave nonetheless. He has his own apartment, earns a paycheck, even has a beautiful (albeit holographic) companion, but is forced to work as a killer for the LAPD, he being a replicant that hunts and ‘retires’ his own kind if they break the rules. As such, he has no friends, those on the force and those as his neighbors visibly disparaging him at every turn, keeping it clear that he and the other manufactured humans are not particularly welcome, if not necessary.

So it is that when he locates a buried box with a skeleton of a female inside under a tree in a far off protein farm, it’s sort of disturbing that she seemed to have died during childbirth, but more so, that she was a replicant. What? Replicants can’t have children, or so the public has been told, so how is this possible? K’s boss Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright) fears the worst if the news were to break and so puts K on the job to secretly find the child … and terminate it.

However, it turns out the K is not the only one onto this discovery. Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the CEO of the Wallace Corporation, who now makes the current replicant models, is looking to unlock the secret to replicant self-reproduction, and puts his heavy on the case, a maniacal woman named Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), who commits to stealing the remains of the woman and following K, killing anything in her way.

That ‘woman’ ends up being none other than Rachel (Sean Young), a beautiful experimental replicant created by the Tyrell Corporation more than thirty years ago … who came under the protection of a young blade runner named Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who rescued her and put into hiding. K learns all this in his investigation, but more troubling is the recurring string of numbers that keep popping up: 6-10-21

He saw them carved into the base of the tree where Rachel’s body was found but also, and this is where K gets most disturbed, in a memory of a small wooden horse he had as a kid, the date written on the toy. This memory is so vivid, of him being chased as a child in the bowels of a strange industrial furnace, he stashing the horse in a secret nook so the bullies after him wouldn’t find it. That the carving in the tree is real leads K and his holographic girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas) to believe that what K is remembering about the toy is also real. But what does it mean?

Investigating further the whereabouts of the missing child, whom he is suspecting might actually be him, he ends up in the now ruined city of San Diego, ending up in a dilapidated orphanage with children working in horrible conditions for a powerful local thug (Lennie James). Strangely, K recognizes the place and on his own explores the broken down facility, soon realizing that it is in fact the home of his youth. Heading to its lower levels, he comes upon locations locked in his memory, and sure enough, he comes upon the place where he hid the toy horse … which he finds is exactly where he left it. Pause for effect. K is the child he hunting … Or is he?

WHY IT MATTERS: Villeneuve is a gifted storyteller, his always challenging films works of intense imagery and sound that often are transportive for the audience, tasking viewers to make connections without the tethers of expositional dialogue. With Blade Runner 2049, he pushes this to its seeming limit, with long, glorious cinematic moments of stillness that soak us into the imagined world with incredible effectiveness.

It is because of this that we so easily and willingly piggyback onto K’s epic odyssey, he a man of very few words or expressions that still, somehow, carry us with great emotion to his many landmarks. None more so impactful as this when he returns to the haunts of his childhood and pulls that wooden horse from it darkened tomb.

One of the greatest things about movies, at least those made by the hands of filmmakers who understand the power of anticipation, is the long slow discovery where we as an audience are invited into the process, making it a sort of participatory experience. Villeneuve is a master at this, his style built on the art of exploration, carefully exposing clues as he goes, keeping us in parallel with the protagonist as they uncover whatever mystery is at hand.

K makes small incremental breakthroughs, very slowly and deliberately connecting these ambiguous dots in his investigation, and it is here where the most startling of his digging is revealed, when he gingerly paces through the cavernous, hulking catacombs of the massive facility’s furnaces, each step uncertain, as if a single wrong footfall would plummet him into an abyss. It’s an agonizing walk filled with some terrific tension, thanks partly to the great score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch.

And that is truly what’s at stake. By venturing into what he thought were works of mental memory architects, K comes to see that in fact, what he has been seeing in his mind are not implants but reality. He was here. He did this. When he pulls the horse from the shadows, seeing that it is the very same horse put there as a child, it shatters him. Who is he? Though this becomes clear enough a bit later, especially when Joi says it right to him when he returns home. K was not made. K was born.

Naturally, Villeneuve isn’t done with his tricks and only at the halfway point, K has much more to learn, but the important thing about this moment is its pivot. For more than an hour into the story, we’ve been building to this seeming truth, suspecting that K is not whom he appears, and now we have it, what looks like concrete evidence to that fact. Villeneuve plays into the ‘Pinocchio’ theme, something long at the heart of the replicant story and it creates this immediate satisfaction for the audience, like gulping water after a day in the desert. K is a real boy and from here, try to solve the mystery of what happened and how to stay alive.

I won’t divulge anything beyond this, simply because to do so would greatly stripe away more secrets than I already have. Blade Runner 2049 is a masterpiece of misdirection and none more so than in its second act. However, it’s greatest moment comes at the halfway point, when a man understands what a memory of youth truly means, and what it says about who he really is. Having everything he thought about himself be completely pulled out from under him is a devastating sequence, one made with no dialogue, trusting its audience to snap together the puzzle pieces on their own. That image is still incomplete is what makes this all the more a terrific cinematic gut punch. This is a great movie moment.