‘Odyssey’ Review: A Woman In Trouble Turns To The Dark Side In Gerard Johnson’s Tough London Thriller – SXSW

deadline.com:

“Bit of a toughie, this one,” are the prophetic first words of this gritty urban thriller by East London-born director Gerard Johnson.

Odyssey’s protagonist, Natasha Flynn (Polly Maberly), is having a wisdom tooth taken out, and we see its removal in close-up.

Thank heavens for small mercies, however; though it presages some extreme violence in the film’s final stretch, this is nothing compared to the extremities of the director’s previous work: consider the unsimulated swingers’ sex party in his last movie Muscle (2019), or the harrowing scenes of sex trafficking in the one that preceded it, Hyena (2014).

Johnson’s forte is the Manichean gangster movie, in that all his films interrogate the relationship between good and evil. His debut, Tony (2009), was an empathetic study of a down-at-heel London serial killer, while Hyena was much on the nose, being the Bad Lieutenant-style story of a corrupt cop working in the capital’s drug squad.