Normal: Ben Wheatley and Bob Odenkirk unleash chaos in small-town America

Writer-producer Derek Kolstad and writer-star Bob Odenkirk, of the Nobody films (2021, 2025), evoke the Coen brothers: Odenkirk’s interim Sheriff is named Ulysses, echoing Ulysses Everett McGill, George Clooney’s character in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). His suspiciously deceased predecessor is called Gunderson, like Frances McDormand’s pregnant cop in Fargo (1996). And the Minnesota town of Normal, with its quirky inhabitants and a police force unused to the grand guignol horrors that come their way, also evokes Fargo, which has spun off several seasons of intricately plotted TV crime drama (2014-24).

Despite Ulysses’ Homeric name, and a visitor to the police station who complains that he is reliving the Myth of Sisyphus (a touchstone for both existentialism and Looney Tunes), Normal is less concerned with classical elements than in setting up a snowbound comic massacre on a par with the Finnish World War II action filmSisu (2022) and its 2025 sequel. Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise, brings in Ben Wheatley to direct, perhaps on the strength of his parodic shoot-out-in-an-abandoned-warehouse farce Free Fire (2016). Wheatley made this polished genre piece back-to-back with hand-crafted science-fiction oddity Bulk (2025), continuing to alternate work-for-hire projects and personal films without losing his glee in staging off-centre dialogue exchanges and cartoonish splatter.

Normal has a slow burn first half as Odenkirk’s gaunt Ulysses, sought out for the fill-in job because he doesn’t “give a shit”, tours the abnormally normal town. The film trusts its audience to notice the oddity of a thriving local economy in a time when towns like this are mostly on their uppers – along with a stockpiling of weaponry excessive even in the context of an American action movie. That a knitting store is as well supplied with guns as the police station raises an eyebrow. A mention that all the rifles on display in a bar are loaded (“Where would be the fun if they weren’t?”) is a Chekhovian first-act gun accompanied by a blaring alert siren.

After fragmenting the mayor (Henry Winkler) with an explosive charge, Wheatley choreographs the carnival of carnage with brio, inventively staging the mess which comes when untrained idiots have access to military hardware, in a manner that subliminally questions notions of ‘normal’ in the current American social landscape. Wheatley and Odenkirk also get a lot out of Ulysses’ off-kilter interactions with ambiguous townsfolk who turn out to be friend, foe or in-between.

► Normal is in UK cinemas now