Director Gerard Johnson’s last feature was the impressively stacked Muscle, a dark thriller featuring a never-better Craig Fairbrass as a menacing personal trainer in Newcastle who takes over the life of his client Simon (Cavan Clerkin), luring him into a sinister subculture. Polly Maberly played Simon’s distant wife whose froideur partially sets the plot in motion. So while it’s easy to forget Maberly’s involvement in Muscle (honestly, the only thing I can remember about the film is Fairbrass and the orgy scene), she gets to take centre stage here in this similarly weird, skewwhiff thriller, this time set in London. And while Odyssey doesn’t coalesce as satisfyingly as Muscle did, that’s not Maberly’s fault. A character actor whose credits include a lot of schlock TV, she gets to be extraordinary here, playing a brittle, funny, completely deluded screw-up whose life comes unravelled.
Maberly plays Natasha Flynn, a small-time estate agent who runs an office with just two other employees, dweeby Spike (Charley Palmer Rothwell) and put-upon Safi (Kellie Shirley), plus new intern Dylan Rose (Jasmine Blackborow). Sometimes, Natasha sweet-talks her staff but more often than not she’s shouting at them, a capriciousness partly fuelled by her steadily increasing intake of cocaine. Completely fluent in the half-truth language of estate agentry, where small spaces are “cosy” and properties in the middle of nowhere are “rural”, Natasha worryingly believes her own lies, especially the one she tells herself about how the upcoming merger with another agency won’t be a takeover. In truth, the wheels are coming off her little toy wagon one by one; she owes money all over town, to old friends and loan sharks. She even owes money to the dentist’s surgery we see her skipping out of in the opening scene, without paying for a wisdom tooth removal.
