The Horse Boy

There’s a moment in the documentary The Horse Boy when the father of the subject, an autistic child named Rowan, explains his son’s intrinsic understanding of nature by showing how Rowan has organized his animal toys by species. The dad marvels that Rowan has grouped biologically close rhinos and pigs in the same box while ignoring the ostrich figurine that’s also in there. This selective filtering of information is typical of the film, a quest toward an inevitable inspirational destination, continuing the recent trend of using precious theater space as a dumping ground for non-cinematic PBS also-rans. Mom and Dad take 6-year-old Rowan, whose jagged tantrums are best relaxed by contact with horses, on a riding tour of Outer Mongolia, to consult tribal shamans in the hopes of untangling his mental blocks. It’s fun to imagine how The Horse Boy‘s intended audience, the nontraditional-therapy crowd, would react to the same film if the parents took Rowan to exorcists in Rome — just imagine a priest bringing up “haunted wombs” — but the Third World otherness does wonders. The Horse Boy may excuse itself as a “raising awareness” tract on autism, but the exotic travelogue isn’t a practical care option for most cases, and it certainly isn’t worthy cinema.