Film Review: ODYSSEY: Polly Maberly Takes a Walk on the Dark Side in a Mediocre and Violent Crime Picture [SXSW 2025]

Odyssey Review

Odyssey (2025) Film Review from the 32nd Annual South by South West Film Festival, a movie directed by Gerard Johnson, written by Austin Collings and Gerard Johnson and starring Polly Maberly, Jasmine Blackborow, Mikael Persbrandt, Tom Davis, Cavan Clerkin, Guy Burnet, Kellie Shirley, Charley Palmer Rothwell, Peter Ferdinando, Rebecca Calder, Daniel De Bourg, Adam Lawrence, Leon Annor, Sarah Beck Mather, Sallieu Sesay, Adrian Derrick-Palmer and Nicholas Clarke.

Odyssey is not the new eagerly awaited film from Christopher Nolan. That “The Odyssey” project is still being put together. This current South by South West entry, which is directed by Gerard Johnson, is over-the-top and is a completely different type of movie altogether. It’s not a very easy film to admire. It stars Polly Maberly in the lead role as a middle-aged woman with short dark hair named Natasha Flynn. In graphic detail, her wisdom tooth is pulled at the beginning of the movie and then the film introduces the viewer to her wild professional life as a real estate person.

Natasha works alongside Dylan Rose (a terrific Jasmine Blackborow) who’s training to become as seasoned an agent as Natasha is. Maberly’s role here is one of those difficult performances that’s easy to hate and hard to love. We last saw such a performance with Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s delicate work in Hard Truths. Jean-Baptiste pulled off her role wonderfully as she walked a thin tightrope throughout while giving her amazing performance. Maberly is pretty good, but she is a bit harder to like than other similar recent difficult characters for a few reasons, namely the situations she becomes immersed in throughout the picture. There’s too little substance regarding the reasons why Natasha has found herself in the predicament she’s currently in.

This film shows Natasha claiming there’s glass in her meal while dining out with Dylan Rose at one point. Before that, Natasha runs away from a bill that doesn’t go through successfully on her credit card. However, she’s apparently a master of sales and knows how to close a deal. As the film progresses, it goes from a real estate story to a violent crime picture that goes too far and pushes the envelope on more than one occasion. It interweaves Natasha’s business world with an underbelly of crime that feels a bit underdeveloped at times.

A major plot point has Natasha driving around in a cab and asking the driver to take her around town while she embarks on a quest to discover some pertinent information. This film takes us through a dark landscape that is both unnerving and disturbing to watch and is, as expected, created with some real authenticity that helps shape the action scenes towards the picture’s ending. Those action scenes don’t merge too well with the rest of the picture, however.

This film’s saving grace is the performance of Mikael Persbrandt who plays a man who helps Natasha in the dark and seedy situation that comes about through the movie’s complicated story line. Persbrandt is a true standout in this picture and distinctly creates a character who leaps off the screen as totally plausible. This character’s bond with Natasha is also well conveyed on-screen. While the rest of the supporting cast is mostly dispensable, Kellie Shirley’s character, Safi, a business partner of Natasha’s, is particularly well constructed in just a few scenes and the relationship between she and Natasha culminates in a memorable couple of uses of the “F-word.”

I’ve read that this movie has been compared to Uncut Gems. It’s nowhere near as good. That film was about a jewelry district worker who had major issues with people from the wrong side of the tracks. This movie is about a real estate worker who has major issues with goons from the other side too but the difference between the two pictures is night and day. We don’t get to see Maberly relish her role the way Adam Sandler did in Gems. Maberly is very good, but she’s not on the level of Sandler in terms of creating her character and developing it although Persbrandt’s supporting turn here is pretty flawless, as previously suggested.

Odyssey is, at times, powerful but it can also be pretty empty at the same time. It takes plot detours and some of the script’s developments don’t seem to flow organically so the movie can seem haphazardly put together at times. Polly Maberly is brave for tackling a dark role like this and she doesn’t fail. She, on the contrary, succeeds, just not to the extent of Sandler’s performance in a film which was just as dark but had more humanity at its core than Odyssey. In the end, Odyssey feels like a stilted attempt at action that needed more emotional edge to drive the plot which would in turn make us feel more invested in the mediocre material at hand.

Rating: 6/10

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