Dir: Ben Wheatley | UK Thriller
Ben Wheatley turns the sleepy American small town into a pressure cooker in Normal, a blackly comic crime thriller that starts like Fargo and gradually mutates into something considerably stranger.
Bob Odenkirk plays Ulysses, a newly installed interim sheriff in Normal, North Dakota, whose apparently reassuring presence barely conceals a past that is anything but clean. Then a gang of Yakuza enforcers arrives from Tokyo, and the town’s carefully maintained façade begins to crack.
Wheatley has always been attracted to the point where genre collapses into delirium, and Normal gives him plenty to play with. The film’s most appealing quality is its off-kilter atmosphere: an eerily deserted town, twitchy inhabitants and a sense that something awful — or absurd — is about to happen. The violence is punctuated by mordant humour, while the visual style gives the supposedly wholesome community a faintly diseased glow.
Odenkirk is perfectly cast. He brings the weary, tightly coiled quality that has become his speciality, suggesting a man who has spent years trying to outrun himself. Henry Winkler and Lena Headey add welcome eccentricity to an ensemble populated by people who seem to have stepped out of a particularly warped Midwestern fever dream.
The problem is that Normal is rather less unpredictable than its title suggests. Wheatley piles on the oddball characters, criminal conspiracies and tonal shifts, but the accumulating eccentricity sometimes feels like an end in itself. The film is much better at creating a distinctive mood than at sustaining a genuinely compelling mystery, and its deliberately deadpan pacing can make the narrative feel intermittently inert.
Still, there is something gratifyingly nasty about it. Normal isn’t really interested in the comforting mythology of small-town America; it sees normality itself as a kind of elaborate criminal conspiracy, maintained by everyone agreeing not to look too closely. Wheatley gives that idea a suitably crooked, violent and occasionally hilarious treatment.
A warped little thriller with a terrific Odenkirk performance — atmospheric, funny and enjoyably unhinged, even if Wheatley’s taste for eccentricity occasionally overwhelms the story.
ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS from 19 OCTOBER