(Above: Bob Odenkirk in Normal (2025). Via IMDB).

By M. Faust

What would it take to get you to sell your soul to the devil? I would like to say that my name uniquely qualifies me to answer this, but in truth Old Nick has never come knocking at my door. (OK, I did once work for the National Enquirer, but I didn’t work on the Enquirer)

I’ll tell you what group does face this question on a seemingly regular basis: talented young filmmakers, especially if they have had an independent hit. When Hollywood drives a dump truck full of money to your door, especially if you’re used to having to scrounge for it, it has to be hard to hold fast to the artistic goals that you started out with. Some directors—Steven Soderbergh comes to mind—manage to have it both ways, taking fat paychecks for multiplex fodder while making personal projects on the side. 

But too many others seem happy to sell out, producing watered-down versions of their calling card movies. To this list I think we have to add the British director Ben Wheatley. Emerging from the very fertile world of British comedy, Wheatley and his partner Amy Jump moved into feature films in the early 2010s with a handful of personal, darkly comic movies that were minimally seen outside of their home turf. They first reached an international audience with their 2015 adaptation of the J. G. Ballard novel High Rise, in which a literal class war is fought among the tenants of a residential skyscraper. 

Always fascinated by cinematic violence, Wheatley and Jump took it as far as it could go with 2016’s Free Fire, which uses the most minimal possible plot set up as a base for ninety minutes of people shooting at each other. I’m not sure what the vision was that it was trying to evoke, but it was certainly purely delivered. 

After that, Jump retired and Wheatley took the last job anyone might have expected of him, a Netflix remake of Rebecca. Hollywood then offered him the big bucks to take over the sequel to the sea monster movie Meg, a movie that no one liked. I haven’t seen it, but from all reports Wheatley’s work was completely faceless. 

The process is now complete with the release of Normal, a generic gunplay movie starring Bob Odenkirk, once a very funny guy who seems to have learned that action is a much more lucrative genre. He stars as Ulysses Richardson (classical scholars can debate the significance of the name if they are so inclined), a man whose flight from personal trauma leads him to a temporary job as sheriff of a town called Normal. 

The deceased lawman Ulysses is subbing for until the new one arrives was Sheriff Gunderson, which of course was the name of Frances McDormand’s character in the Coen Brothers’ classic Fargo. Certainly that’s no accident, as the milieu here is corruption under the surface of a seemingly idyllic midwestern community. 

The character of that corruption (involving the Yakuza, as far from the Midwest as you can get) is such that this story might have been expanded into a season of the TV series Fargo. I don’t want to give away too many details because there really aren’t that many of them: in a movie that lasts barely an hour and a half, you don’t want to spend too much time fretting over the plot. Suffice to say that it pits Ulysses against practically everyone else in this heavily armed town, at least until sides shift in a cynical third act twist that may make you feel like you’re watching the nightly news (And isn’t that what we go to the movies to get away from?) Normal is competent enough for its minimal goals. It’s a shame that it is not presently booked at our one remaining drive-in, as that would be the ideal place to see it.