Reviewed on 8th September 2025 at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival
Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Ryan Allen, Billy MacLellan, Lena Headey, Henry Winkler
Genre: Action, Crime, ThrillerÂ
Director:Â Ben Wheatley
In Irish Cinemas: 15th May 2026
Bob Odenkirk seems to have stumbled into a strange cinematic niche: bruised, battered men trapped inside movies whose titles begin with the letter “N.” First came the relentless punishment of “Nobody” and its sequel “Nobody 2.” Before those, there was Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” where Odenkirk portrayed a son emotionally sidelined by Bruce Dern’s stubborn patriarch. Physical beatdowns were limited there, but emotional wear-and-tear certainly counted for something.
“Normal,” however, shifts away from the secret-assassin formula audiences now associate with Odenkirk. The setup initially feels familiar: a quiet middle-aged man arrives in a sleepy Midwestern town carrying invisible emotional baggage, but this time there are no buried combat skills waiting to erupt. Ulysses, the film’s weary protagonist, is exactly what he appears to be: an ordinary sheriff trying to survive an uneventful temporary posting in the tiny snowbound town of Normal, Minnesota.
The audience is tipped off immediately that peace will not last. An opening sequence set in Tokyo introduces a brutal Yakuza punishment ritual involving ritualised finger mutilation, ending with one disgraced gangster being banished to an unlikely destination: Normal, Minnesota. From that point onward, the film slowly tightens its grip, layering menace beneath the town’s deceptively polite surface.
As Ulysses settles into his duties, the locals appear welcoming yet strangely cautious, as though everyone is quietly guarding the same secret. Personal tragedy has left the sheriff emotionally detached, believing that life becomes simpler when emotional investment is kept at arm’s length. That philosophy is tested once a vicious blizzard traps everyone together, and desperation begins to boil over.
Chaos arrives in the form of two deeply incompetent criminals who decide that robbing the town bank might solve their financial problems. What they fail to anticipate is the almost cult-like protectiveness the townspeople feel toward that institution. The robbery spirals into something far stranger and far deadlier than expected, eventually placing Ulysses in the bizarre position of defending the robbers from the very citizens they intended to victimise. The film reveals these reversals with such gleeful unpredictability that explaining them in more detail would ruin half the fun.
Overall: 6.5/10
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