Odyssey begins with a close-up of a wisdom tooth being pulled out. This uncomfortable procedure is an apt introduction to the immense pressure that patient Natasha Flynn (the amazing Polly Maberly) is under, as she struggles to maintain appearances and keep her North London company in the black and on the up. With its staff of just two others (Kellie Shirley, Charley Palmer Rothwell), Flynn’s Estate Agency is modest, but Natasha – always plugged in, often coked up, and living alone in a beautiful London penthouse way beyond her means – is nothing if not ambitious, with plans to launch a pioneering ‘world wide letting app’, and to merge with the much bigger realty business owned by Dom (Daniel De Bourg). Yet despite all her efforts to conceal it, Natasha is massively in debt – not just to the bank, and to affluent personal lender Sophie (Rebecca Calder), but also to wide boy Dan Hayter (Guy Burnet) – and now even to the dental firm which she was too insolvent to pay for her expensive extraction.
In short, Natasha is desperate. She may spend the rest of this day showing eager intern Dylan Rose (Jasmine Blackborrow) the tricks of the trade, so that at least the beginning of Gerard Johnson’s latest feature operates as a satire of letting agents’ work-hard play-hard unscrupulousness – but as the rest of this week from hell unfolds, calibrated with an intertitle for each successive day, the tensions build to make Natasha’s predicament feel more akin to something out of the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019). Dan and his menacingly aggressive brother Will Hayter (Ryan Hayes) make Natasha a ‘business proposal’: in exchange for having her debts to them cancelled, she must keep bound-and-beaten fellow estate agent Douglas Kelly (Ben Shafik) captive in a remote ‘problem property’ on her books. Knowing that the brothers are going to kill Douglas – and probably her too – she finally reaches out to family acquaintance the Viking (Mikael Persbrandt) – old-fashioned and gentlemanly, but not to be underestimated – to help her take care of business.
Carved into the wooden floor beneath the carpet of the living room at Calypso Farm – where the ultraviolent climax of Odyssey unfolds – is a pentagram, suggestive of the occult and hell-rasing devilry afoot. Yet as this ‘creepy’ old property’s very name, not to mention the title of Johnson’s film, suggests, there is another mythic frameworks at play here. For this is the not-quite-epic tale of Natasha’s Ulyssean voyage into the night, and her eventual bloody return to reclaim her beleaguered real estate crown. Much as the Viking, informed of Natasha’s financial woes, will console her, “We’re all in debt one way or another”, Johnson’s screenplay, co-written with Austin Collings, will similarly universalise criminality. For here, exchanges of property and money are all tainted with deception, cutthroat tactics and sociopathic power play.
Odyssey is an odd if always engaging film about the devil’s business, be it housing rentals or profit-driven murder, where ultimately, even as the latest tech is embraced, there will always be no school like the old school, and merciless massacres still bring an end to modern as much as ancient legends.
Odyssey had its UK Premiere at EIFF and London Premiere at FrightFest. Icon Film Distribution presents Odyssey in UK cinemas from 7 November
