There are countless ways to start a movie, so why not go with a wisdom tooth being pulled out in excruciating closeup? Gerard Johnson, director and co-writer of the film Odyssey (2025) – somehow not to be confused with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) – does so here and it certainly helps to give his movie a snappy start; Un Chien Andalou with a tooth not an eyeball.
But while opening on some mutilation might seem a good bet for engaging your audience in a popular drama, if it doesn’t quite float then you’ve run the risk of alienating them when the patient and protagonist turns out to be an estate agent (or realtor in America), as some people don’t like them.
No such worries here though. Polly Maberly’s antihero Natasha Flynn is a delicious panic; a London businesswoman thoroughly caught in the gyres from her jet speed lifestyle. Worryingly, despite being supposedly successful, she legs it out of that dentist’s without paying, in the first of a number of quirky scenes in Johnson’s free-wheeling pleasure of a movie.
” … antihero Natasha Flynn is a delicious panic …”
Flynn seems happy running her eponymous “boutique letting agents” in Camden, letting flats to gullible punters with the loving care of a trap door spider. The first act concerns itself largely with her proud mentoring of new arrival Dylan (Jasmine Blackborow) at her firm. But the really salient action is when Natasha is in her very swanky duplex penthouse apartment.
A Mistress of The Universe doing yoga at sun rise, she is otherwise endlessly alone and indulging one addiction problem after another. It’s a good, hard part for Maberly, who is in pretty much every scene and steals pretty much all of them. She gets herself all over some wild material without a hitch and wears the whole film like paint. Her staff are also well played; a bunch of galley slaves and room meat to be alternately shocked or absorbed by Natasha’s crooked drive.
The particulars of work soon get increasingly eclipsed however as the film morphs into a crime drama. You see she’s not as lonely as that. She has a boyfriend of sorts, Dan (Guy Burnet) who is also a loan shark of sorts, and he would like her to do his scary brother Will (Ryan Hayes) a blood soaked favor. Natasha then alternates between being in a blind panic and seeming to be not too badly out of her depth around gangsters.
"…a mad psychodrama"
