Sean Parker
Crime thrillers exploring the underbellies of society aren’t hard to find these days, but the good ones are few and far between. The UK has brought us its fair share of gritty indie darlings throughout the years, films which have captured varying levels of crime and chaos, all while retaining an atmosphere projecting nefarious elements from the most unexpected places. British crime dramas remain one of the most underrated subgenres on the planet, and Gerard Johnson’s Odyssey is one of the slickest I’ve seen in years. Odyssey mixes the shadowy ethics of loan sharks with the sharkish ambition of real estate, immersing the audience in a surreal, drug-fueled fantasy of greed and violence when the sun goes down, and the result is gloriously befitting its anti-hero’s journey.
Polly Maberly delivers a passionate performance as Natasha Flynn, one of the top rising real estate agents in London. Natasha’s days may be filled with business calls and open houses, but her nights are reserved for nightclubs, online poker, and all kinds of substances. While her professional life appears to be on the rise, it’s easy to see the slipping veneer behind the scenes. With no family or close friendships, Natasha seems to fill the void in her life by avoiding financial responsibility for most goods and services. Desperately searching for a way to speed a partnership along with another agency, she’s secured a loan from a less-than-reputable source. When the loan sharks come to collect on the debt, the payment is a favor –one that could potentially end everything Natasha has built.
To dig herself out from under the situation, Natasha goes looking for a hired gun from her past, who goes by (The Hobbit’s Mikael Persbrandt), The Viking. Her search takes her into seedy private clubs and through bars whose patrons she’s ripped off throughout the years. When The Viking shows up to help her, Natasha tells him the new deal she’s been forced into: hiding a kidnapped man for the small-time gangsters on one of her properties. The Viking forms a plan to break Natasha out of her debt… one featuring some heavy artillery.
Odyssey is a whirlwind of masked professionalism harboring the soft morals of a cutthroat sociopath, and Maberly delivers a delightfully contentious performance. She has a flawless rhythm to the way her course demeanor gets under your skin. You hate this character, and yet, like so many repugnant characters, you become transfixed with whether or not they’ll endure. Johnson and co-writer Austin Collings’ character feels pulled right from the high-society pages, and I think she’d fit in wonderfully with Logan Roy and the cast of Succession, even if she is living far beyond her means.
The film is a heavy, dark satire of the modern housing crisis, involving the greedy motivations and predatory practices of high-pressure real estate, as well as their carefully designed tactics and perfectly curated personas. The film seamlessly compares this smooth-talking hustle to loan sharking, bridging the idea of what should be a happy time for couples with the financial bloodletting, shattered realities, and unaffordability. The same things that led to the 2008 housing market collapse in the United States. Director Johnson has a general idea of where this is all headed, and if the ending of his film is any indication, it doesn’t exactly look good.
Maberly is also joined by an exceptional cast in Odyssey, who, alongside Persbrandt, include Guy Burnet (Oppenheimer, Fubar), Jasmine Blackborow (The Gentlemen, Marie Antoinette), Daniel De Bourg (MobLand, Fountain of Youth), and Peter Ferdinando (Ghost in the Shell, High-Rise). It’s hard to believe the film would be as transcendent without them, as each character brings different nuances to the mechanics of corporate narcissism, and shows the less-than-authentic personas of leaders who only care about extending the bottom line.
Odyssey is a pensive film that you will sit with for a few days mulling over the ins and outs of, like a proper heady thriller. The ultraviolent end piece seems almost inspired by the fantastic lore of the John Wick series. However, as imaginative as it is for the seemingly ordinary Wick to turn out to be an infamous assassin, the believability of a real estate agent’s affiliation with gangsters and hitmen is dangerously more realistic by the inflated state of home prices and aggressive corporate purchasing strategies.
Additionally, I had a few flashbacks to the film, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, in Odyssey’s similar moody quest, noir aesthetics, excellent casting choices, and well-thought-out trajectory. However, where the Clive Owen classic leaves the audience on a bit of an anticlimactic lurch, Odyssey truly satisfies with a gore-filled finale and entrancingly horror-adjacent concepts. I’m really looking forward to catching up on Johnson’s previous features, Tony, Muscle, and Hyena, in the wake of catching Odyssey at FrightFest.
Odyssey held its London Premiere at FrightFest on Monday, August 25. For more information on this and other films playing at the festival, please see the FrightFest website.
Odyssey Trailer (2025) | Coming Soon to Cinemas | Polly Maberly, Mikael Persbrandt
Coming soon to UK cinemas. A cutthroat real estate agent takes a spectacular fall from the corporate ladder when her loan-sharks call in their debts. Fiery, sharp-tongued, and ambitious real estate agent Natasha Flynn lives every day on the verge of total success – or ruin.
