Odyssey Review – Estate agents, cocaine and mental breakdown in a meandering London film | film

DDirector Gerard Johnson’s latest film was the impressively stacked Muscle, a dark thriller featuring a never-better Craig Fairbrass as a dangerous Newcastle personal trainer who takes over the life of his client Simon (Cavan Clerkin), drawing him into a raunchy subculture. Polly Maberley played Simon’s distant wife whose chatter partly sets the plot in motion. So, while it’s easy to forget Maperly’s involvement in Muscle (honestly, the only thing I can remember about the movie is Fairbrass and the orgy scene), she’ll take center stage here in this strange, distorted thriller, this time set in London. And while the Odyssey doesn’t integrate as satisfyingly as the Muscle did, that’s not Maberly’s fault. She’s a character actress whose credits include plenty of schlock TV, and she’s extraordinary here, playing a fragile, funny, and utterly deluded character whose life is falling apart.

Maberly plays Natasha Flynn, a junior real estate agent who runs an office with only two other employees, dweeby Spike (Charlie Palmer Rothwell) and Safi (Kelly Shirley), as well as new trainee Dylan Rose (Yasmine Blackborough). Sometimes, Natasha sweet-talks her employees, but more often she screams at them, a whim partly fueled by her steadily increasing cocaine intake. Perfectly fluent in the half-truth language of real estate agents, where small lots are “cosy” and properties in the middle of nowhere are “rural,” Natasha disturbingly believes her own lies, especially the ones she tells herself about how an upcoming merger with another agency won’t be a takeover. In fact, the wheels come off her little carriage one by one; She owes money all over town to her old friends and sharks. She even owes money for the dentist’s surgery, which we see her leaving in the opening scene, without paying for her wisdom teeth to be removed.

The set-up is promising and some viewers may feel as though they are ready to expect Natasha’s comeuppance, especially since estate agents may be the only type of professional less popular than dentists. But instead, the film takes a strangely winding path into Grand Guignol horror territory, when Natasha is forced to help kidnap another estate agent, Douglas Kelly (Ben Chafik), at the request of a third, Dom (Daniel de Bourgh), and keep Douglas tied up at a secluded estate in Essex called Calypso Farm.

That Homeric echo of the farm’s name might make you think that this is gearing up to be some kind of Odyssey parody – but no, there will be no going back to Natasha’s house, only forward and deeper into some kind of demented madness. The final act’s gory exaggeration doesn’t feel earned or even very logical, but Maberly is a watchable film so intense that you can forgive the film its sins. It helps that Johnson has such a big helping of music from the soundtrack, created by his brother Matt Johnson, best known for his band The, which produces a pulsing, menacing score.