Director – Gerard Johnson – 2025 – UK – Cert. 18 – 110m
****
A ruthless London estate agent with mounting debts finds herself at the mercy of criminal backers – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 7th
This starts off no holds barred with protagonist Natasha (Polly Maberly from Muscle, Gerard Johnson, 2019) having a tooth removed at the dentist’s, then having her card declined as she attempts to pay the £950 bill, going out of the front door after the third failed payment attempt. Throughout what follows, she will consistently receive phone messages about the outstanding amount and ignore them, although you suspect they are slowly eating away at her soul along with most of the other influences in her life. Somehow the incident seems to define her character: a driven, self-made woman – or, more accurately, a self-making one who never quite got there and lives beyond her means to maintain the illusion.
Natasha runs a tight office with right-hand woman Safi (Kellie Shirley), tech guy Spike (Charley Palmer Rothwell) developing a game-changing app for her, and promising new girl learning the ropes Dylan (Jasmine Blackborow). But Natasha is the person in charge of everything, the place where the buck stops, and despite their undoubted talents the other three seem scarcely to matter: it’s all about Natasha as she struggles to see through a hostile takeover, or, as she frames it, merger.
On a personal level, as the credit card incident at the dentist’s suggests, she clearly has problems; and so does her business. When she is showing prospective tenants around rental properties, selling the idea of the place to them, you can’t help but suspect she’s being more than a little economical with the truth. And later on, there are phone messages from or meetings with unhappy clients that back this view up.
Her biggest headache is an unrentable property on her books, the enticingly named Calypso Farm, somewhere in the countryside outside London. Far from the joyous partying, Jamaican atmosphere the name conjures, it’s a rundown farm estate in desperate need of maintenance and repair; when she goes over there to check, she finds bags of rubbish have still not been collected. And, disturbingly, when she rolls back a decrepit-looking carpet, she finds a pentagram inside a circle on the floorboards.
Meanwhile, on the news, one of her main competitors, Douglas has mysteriously gone missing.
In search of capital to keep the business going, she schmoozes seedy nightclub owner Dan (Guy Burnet). However, it turns out that Dan and his brother Will (Ryan Hayes) want her to do them a favour in return; they drive her to a deserted warehouse where they have the beaten, up Douglas Kelly (Ben Shafik) bound and gagged; Dan’s story is that Douglas took money from them that wasn’t his; they just want her to look after him somewhere safe for a few days. If she co-operates, they’ll give her her much needed loan, and if she doesn’t, something much less pleasant may happen to her.
Seeing no way out, she goes in search of old family friend The Viking in London’s pubs and clubs. After some narrow escapes, she tracks him (Mikael Persbrand) down. Having found him, she feels she now has a way out of an otherwise impossible situation…
It’s hard to feel sympathy for Natasha, a woman who thinks nothing of trampling on others to improve her own lot. When you see a corporate video with various clients telling how wonderful and caring she is to work with, you don’t really believe it because, as brilliantly created by Maberly, Natasha is so fiercely competitive that other people seem to be merely an inconvenience – unless they get in her way, in which case they are enemies. Nevertheless, even if much of her fate is of her own making, you somehow want her to come through – perhaps it’s because Dan and, particularly, Will, the two men she comes up against, are so irredeemably unpleasant and nasty. Once the Viking comes into the picture, however, she is reassured. She has been in a dark place, but suddenly she can see light at the end of the tunnel.
For director Johnson, it’s another bleak portrait of Britain, with people just struggling to get by. If the world of estate agents is dog eat dog, while the underworld from which Natasha seeks funding is far, far more dangerous. The Viking, however, stands in contrast to all this, telling Natasha she is a slave to her mobile phone, an item he himself does without. She protests that she needs the phone for business, without it, people couldn’t contact her in an emergency. You found me, didn’t you, comes the reply.
In her presence, at Calypso Farm where Douglas is held captives and Dan and Will will be visiting shortly, The Viking lays out a series of hand weapons, finding her a gun she can handle and planting other other items at suitable points in the property – atop doorways, under mattresses – where he can access them as required during the impending bloodbath. Natasha will emerge feeling empowered to take on, destroy and thus clear away any obstacle or person in her path. If The Viking is a mythological hero who turns the tables and saves the day through redemptive violence, her victory thanks to his help turns her into a monster. It’s as if her selfish ethos has finally been given free rein, and the results are terrifying.
While Gerard Johnson certainly knows how to direct a gripping thriller, you feel he’s more interested in his central character: how does a woman get to be like this? – something he and Polly Maberly explore at some considerable length in the extraordinary performance he gets out of her thanks also, in part, to Johnson and Austin Collings’ solid script. When she drives, the intensity of the shots of her car roof moving rapidly through its surroundings reminded me of the similarly intense shots of the car carrying Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971).
Adding to the overall atmosphere, the score by Gerard’s brother Matt (a.k.a. post-punk band The The) seems to break new ground compared to his previous soundtrack work rather than repeating what he has done before. At one point, a male / female duet suggests that men and women see things very differently and want very different things. Natasha is a woman in a man’s world; as here created by director and actress, she seems to embody what one might describe as a feminine version of toxic masculinity. If she is an accurate portrait of where British society is now, this is a bleak vision indeed.
Odyssey is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, November 7th.
Trailer: