Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gerard Johnson
Starring: Polly Maberly, Mikael Persbrandt, Guy Burnet, Charley Palmer Rothwell, Purab Kohli, Jasmine Blackborow, Kellie
Shirley
With his previous thrillers - Tony,
Hyena,
Muscle
- director Gerard Johnson has delivered character studies of working
class men falling through the cracks of broken Britain. With
Odyssey he's switched things up by centring the drama on a
middle class woman, one who on the surface seems to be doing well for
herself in the cutthroat world of modern London. But this is a Gerard
Johnson movie after all, and his latest protagonist is in just as much of a
mess as the men who preceded her in the director's filmography.
Natasha (Polly Maberly) is a classic case of fur coat and no
drawers. She runs an apparently successful letting agency, and she's very
good at her job, which essentially involves using a combination of charm and
deceit to convince prospective tenants to pay London's infamous rental
prices for cramped (or "compact," to use her duplicitous jargon) hovels.
Natasha has big plans. She wants to open a second branch, merge with a
larger real estate firm and release a global letting app. But Natasha's ego
has led to her writing cheques she literally can't cash. She's in debt to a
friend, to the bank, and most dangerously of all, to a pair of money
lenders, Dan (Guy Burnet) and Will (Ryan Hayes). And she's
also got an expensive coke habit to support.
While Natasha can keep her friend and the bank at arm's length, shaking off
Dan and Will proves more difficult. The pair offer Natasha a solution. If
she agrees to hide an indebted estate agent they've abducted on one of her
properties, they'll clear her debt. Natasha initially walks away from the
proposition but quickly realises they've made her an offer she can't refuse.
Desperate to get out of her situation, Natasha scours the sleazier side of
London in search of a mysterious figure from her past known as "The Viking"
(Mikael Persbrandt).
In similar fashion to his crooked cop thriller Hyena, Johnson again delivers a movie that's recognisably British in its gritty
scuzziness but bathes it in the sort of neon palette you might expect of a
Michael Mann movie. Natasha lives in a fashionable high rise, which affords
Johnson the opportunity to deliver the trademark Mann shot of a protagonist
gazing out their wide blue window, but in this case Natasha is seen
literally looking down at the city and all its plebs. Natasha is the focus
of almost every shot in the film, and Johnson's camera keeps close to her
face as she traverses the city. This creates the impression that she's
surrounded by millions but entirely self-centred, constantly swearing into a
protrusive bluetooth headset that gives here the appearance of an evil
cyborg queen.
As Natasha, Maberly is a firebrand. Her credits go back as far as
children's dramas in the '80s but this is her most notable role since she
played Kitty in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. And yet Maberly commands our attention in a way that makes us feel like
we're watching someone who has been landing leading roles for decades. It's
as close to a female version of Christian Bale's
American Psycho performance as I've seen, but Maberly plays
Natasha's brand of coke-fuelled social-climbing sociopathy in more
self-aware fashion. Despite her cold facade, Natasha seems to know when
she's out of her depth, purposely assuming diva behaviour as a manner of
trying to assert herself (a hissy fit in a restaurant is so uncomfortable
for all concerned that you have to watch it through your fingers). Natasha
is reprehensible, the sort of monster responsible for most of western
society's problems, but as a woman determined to make it in a man's world,
we do find some sympathy for her need to be the loudest voice in every room
she enters. Plus, her brand of villainy is wildly entertaining to
watch.
It's credit to Maberly's strengths that Odyssey just about
manages to pull off the wild tonal shift it takes in the final act when The
Viking finally makes an appearance. If most of the movie plays like one of
the Safdie brothers' manic tales of troubled protagonists rushing around a
city in search of a way out of their problems, Johnson leads us into
territory that has more in common with the John Wick franchise
for his blood-soaked climax. I found myself wondering why such a switch
wasn't causing me whiplash, and I put it largely down to Maberly's ability
to keep us onside with the movie's potentially disruptive decisions. Like
its protagonist, Odyssey is a movie that seduces with its
dangerous charisma to the point where you're willing to follow it down the
most dimly lit of narrative back alleys.
