Of the several mind-numbing effects of hallucinogens, tunnel vision is a common one. At once episodic and habitual, the loss of peripheral sight seemingly colours Moyra Davey’s sedating feature-length work Horse Opera (2022). In isolated close-ups, Davey constructs a visual journal of her pandemic isolation: stacks of books and records; artefacts and paraphernalia littering living quarters; hilly, wintry, pastoral outdoors; a black mastiff lazily trudging through snow; and birds pecking at feeders hanging from tree branches. Reminiscent of iris shots from early silent cinema, Davey’s gaze imitates tunnel vision with indulgent candour, particularly lensing the physicality of horses.

Portrayed with gratuitous, matter-of-fact tendresse, circular frames capture equine genitalia—peeing, pulsating—mostly vaginal. Scoring this fixation is a parallel fictional account. In Davey’s signature torpid drawl, she recites her writings on Elle, the protagonist of her diaristic text. Narrated in third person throughout the course of her film, Davey juxtaposes her own ailing solitude with the character’s experiences of raving sociality.

Elle seems attuned to her own tunnel vision. She is described by Davey as a single mother who self-medicates and frequents loft parties in New York City. “Elle is happy when her head is ripped,” Davey narrates, “but by the end of the night when the lights come on and they stand around chatting, she can’t bear it.” Using psychoactives like LSD, cocaine, and crystal, she keenly observes the sartorial choreographies and comportments of party guests. When alone, Elle reads the writings of essayists like Hilton Als, Anne Boyer, and Elizabeth Hardwick. She registers her ageing body, with its insomnia and medicinal dependencies. “Thinking about the infusion that would soon be administered to her, Elle is hit with a surge of guilt for submitting to such experiences,” Davey writes of the character waiting at the doctor’s office, seemingly familiar with the dual sensations of drug use—ecstasy and dissatisfaction—both in undergoing treatment and as recreational habit.

The artist sutures Elle’s narcotized stream of consciousness with documentarian, candid shots of foals, mares, and surrounding fauna, evoking the trippy circularity and telescopic inertia of Virginia Woolf’s “tunnelling process.” In a diary entry from August 30, 1923, Woolf—who Davey recalls Als referring to as “suicide bitch” in the latter’s collection of essays White Girls (2013)—writes: “How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.”

Music, punctuating in interludes, appears to be Davey’s tunnel, activating the inner lives of Horse Opera. Entwining Elle’s liquor-laced delirium against the artist’s own agrarian remove in the country, beloved radio and vinyl tunes consistently cascade in and out of her hour-long, autofictional cinema. From Leon “Ndugu” Chancler’s underheard, disco-hued R&B cover of Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing,” to The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ecstatic version of the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” tracks from Davey’s personal collection inflect her narration of Elle’s inebriated, dissociated interiority.

An orchestra of the outdoors also apostrophizes these narrative threads. While walking her dog late one evening, Elle is “surprised to hear how many birds sing after dusk.” Music similarly pairs with the ambient chorus of daily life that surrounds Davey— neighing ponies and stallions, pouring rain clouds, or hands rummaging through kitchen items and barn supplies. In a few instances, moody ballads, LSD-inspired rhythms, and dance hits anticipate detailed captures of horse privates. The artist’s care for the barn creature crescendos in such iris shots of its cavernous mouth, trotting hoof, and languid flank. In a memorable sequence, the symphonic motions of her hands clean a saddle before carefully wrapping red cloth around a horse’s front leg.

One then wonders: how entangled are Davey’s horses with her imaginary Elle, and with Davey herself? Pronounced by the artist’s fish-eyed attention to animalia, this query echoes throughout the multispectral universe of Horse Opera. At one point, Davey is seen lying supine like a corpse, covered by a blanket that reads “prochaine station,” inside what appears to be a basement. For the first time in the film, a body assumes the state of complete, staged stillness—not pacing, nor tending to domestic tasks or farm chores. Not prancing, not chewing, nor yawning, nor urinating, as in the case of her horses. Revealing the falsity of a singular protagonist, her brief enactment of death, with its liveable likeness and campy stagnation, oddly grounds the artist’s biodiverse autofictions. Maybe this is the elegiac, primal state that Davey’s zooted, infirm bibliophile Elle has only ever felt in fragments, but perhaps longs for in perpetuity.