FrightFest review – Odyssey (2025)
Here’s a tidied-up version for Sight & Sound.
At one point in writer-director Gerard Johnson’s Odyssey, estate agent Natasha Flynn (Polly Maberly) visits a farmhouse in Essex which is proving to be a difficult rental prospect and lifts a carpet to find a huge pentagram carved into the floor. She more or less shrugs this off as a minor inconvenience – possibly less tricky to spin to a potential client that noisy next-door neighbours or creeping damp. Anyone who’s bought or rented in and around the capital knows that the London property market is one of the most horrifying businesses in the UK – and Johnson isn’t shy of showing just how closely it’s aligned to organised (and disorganised) crime and near-psychopathic levels of extreme behaviour.
Natasha starts her day with the extraction of a wisdom tooth and a declined credit card payment she hurries away from. Later, she kicks up a fuss about imaginary glass in a salad to avoid a restaurant lunch bill without letting her All About Eve intern (Jasmine Blackborow) twig how fragile her business is. Natasha is always on the move, Bluetooth stuck in her ear, doing lines of cocaine which don’t kill the dental pain, trying to give the impression that her firm is on the rise even as she’s contemplating a merger which sounds more like a takeover and coping with a moneylender whose even shadier brother offers her a poisoned chalice of a way out of her short-term cash-flow worries. She even does her job, smooth-talking renters and buyers into taking what do actually look like great flats – though we suspect there are hidden issues.
Another estate agent has disappeared after failing to settle debts to the same nasty people and Natasha can get off the hook if she helps abductors keep him out of sight for a few days, with that possibly demon-haunted farmhouse as an obvious bolthole. Even she knows this will get her in deeper, so she trawls the more nightmarish clubs of the city putting the word out that she’d like to connect with ‘the Viking’ (Mikael Persbrandt), a shady yet philosophical character with whom she has a longstanding family tie. The upshot is that a spiral into madness and pain for the protagonist takes a gruesome turn as some gangsters find out that they’re just amateurs in horror compared to a London estate agent.
Johnson, who co-wrote with Austin Collings, has previously made the serial killer drama Tony, the corrupt cop picture Hyena and the roid rage movie Muscle. He’s the most underrated director currently working at the top of his game in Britain – his films home in on distinctly British (distinctly London) strands of lowlife which are explored with hallucinatory vividness which is at once near-surreal and as well-observed as the most rigorous exercise in social realism. He what you’d get if Abel Ferrara and Mike Leigh were fused in a telepod. You have to wince and you have to laugh.
Odyssey, not to be confused with the forthcoming Christopher Nolan film, is built around a remarkable, committed, awards-worthy turn from Polly Maberly – a ‘where has she been all this time?’ diva-level star whose CV checks off all the expected Brit film/TV boxes (Doctors, Casualty, Emmerdale, EastEnders) but on the strength of this ought to be giving her Lady Macbeth or Medea in the near future.
Odyssey had its UK Premiere at EIFF and London Premiere at FrightFest
Icon Film Distribution presents Odyssey in UK cinemas from 7 November
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