Crime thrillers thrive on a relentless, anxiety-inducing pressure surrounding their characters. They often follow protagonists caught in regrettable situations, digging a deeper hole for themselves in their desperate attempts to escape it. “Uncut Gems” captured that desperation through its frenzied rhythm, while “Collateral” analyzed it through its psychological layers in nightmarish nightscapes.
Gerard Johnson’s “Odyssey,” a crime thriller he wrote with Austin Collings, presents itself in similar shades of frenzy and panic. Yet, instead of male protagonists that usually occupy this genre space with their anxieties or temerity, it explores that through a woman’s perspective.
The protagonist, Natasha Flynn (Polly Maberly), is a ruthless estate agent working in the bourgeois neighbourhoods in London. Her job involves persuading clients to accept her offer on any given housing property based on its perceived benefits and seeking their tenancy confirmation within the first meeting.
The script presents that as someone getting what they want by any means necessary while openly disregarding the feelings of anyone who comes in their way. She maintains that mindset throughout her interactions with Dylan (Jasmine Blackborow), her firm’s new employee, who seems eager to learn the ropes and rise through the ranks as soon as possible.
Dylan’s impressionability is placed against Natasha’s ruthlessness, occasionally making us wonder who’s mirroring whom. Was Natasha once as young and hungry for success as Dylan is? Did that hunger push her to be her present self? The film poses these questions through suggestions of Natasha’s underlying pain.
She waltzes in and out of rooms and intimidates nearly everyone, but that facade momentarily cracks open when someone else seems to threaten her authority. So, her personality becomes a cocktail of contrasting traits, with a moderate fear underlying her impulsive, temperamental disposition. She seems conditioned to survive that way in a dog-eat-dog world.
The fear breaks through her layers of calculated composure when a loan shark threatens to upend her life. For a person at her stage in their life, it poses an existential threat beyond its literal implications.
The early scenes establish the fact that she is on the edge, in a constant state of panic, treating everyone through a fear of losing grip over her mirage. It’s not immediately clear whether that’s her living precariously by default or a result of something specific. Yet, the moment it begins to explore its emotional roots, the film starts losing the momentum that it built through its first few scenes.
After being introduced as a tense drama about an estate agent’s underlying turmoil, “Odyssey” suddenly shifts into the lane to become a blood-soaked thriller about a woman put into a situation that spirals out of her control. It’s a well-known premise that the script drags through its delirious second act through a string of twists and turns that seldom feel convincing.
While a sharp and perceptive professional before, Natasha is later shown as a careless and helpless woman, unsure of what she should do in any given situation. Despite hinting at her probable vulnerabilities in the initial beats and including a moment that shakes her unwavering confidence, neither the script nor the direction quite earns the shift in her outward personality. It affects the dramatic momentum, and the film never quite recovers from it.
There are some clearly well-executed, delirious scenes and thrilling set-pieces, but they work in isolation, not as a unit, at least not as seamlessly as they could have with a sharper characterization.
At times, it hints at a narrative similar to Ilya Naishuller’s “Nobody” or David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” but it isn’t compulsively watchable like the former or deftly self-reflexive like the latter. It shines in its grittier moments, where the protagonist gets caught in a gnarly gorefest, leading to a sense of catharsis. Yet, it isn’t nearly as effective as it could have been.
None of the blame for those flaws goes to Maberly’s emphatic performance, who captures plenty of nuance even in the film’s extreme moments that place Natasha in the middle of mayhem. She makes Natasha’s anxiety feel palpable, which becomes a strong suit for the film when it swings between some intense narrative shifts. Besides her, Mikael Persbrandt is also a strong addition to the cast, making his character, The Viking, seem like it’s in the pantheon of audacious players from the John Wick universe. However, that’s partially the issue.
If the film had been an out-and-out action thriller without any cerebral undertones or satirical overtones, it could have been better. Even the present cinematographic approach could have been far more effective in that context. Instead, the film feels like an intense, gory thriller stuck in the body of a film like “Nightcrawler,” trying to paint a similarly bleak outlook of the world we live in, but falling short despite an exceptional central performance.
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