Odyssey: tense thriller enters the gruesome, grimy world of a London estate agent

At one point in writer-director Gerard Johnson’s Odyssey, estate agent Natasha (Polly Maberly) visits an Essex farmhouse which is proving a difficult rental prospect. She lifts a carpet to find a pentagram carved into the floor and shrugs it off as a minor inconvenience – possibly less tricky to spin than noisy next-door neighbours or creeping damp. Anyone who’s bought or rented in and around the capital knows that the London property market is one of the most horrifying businesses in the UK and Johnson depicts estate agency as closely aligned to organised (and disorganised) crime, psychopathic levels of extreme behaviour and possibly actual demonic influence. 

Natasha starts her day with the extraction of a wisdom tooth and a declined credit card. Later, she kicks up a fuss about imaginary glass in a salad to avoid a lunch bill without letting her All About Eve intern (Jasmine Blackborow) realise her business is financially in peril. Maberly is extraordinary in the lead – always on the move, Bluetooth stuck in her ear, self-medicating with cocaine, descending through levels of hell. She even does her job, smooth-talking renters and buyers into taking what do actually look like great flats – though we suspect there are hidden issues. Natasha has borrowed from a wannabe gangster whose more seriously shadier brother offers her a poisoned chalice of a way out of short-term cash-flow worries which involves abetting a kidnap (of another estate agent) and probable torture.   

Even she knows this will get her in deeper trouble, so she trawls the more nightmarish clubs of the city putting the word out that she’d like to connect with ‘the Viking’ (Mikael Persbrandt), a professionally violent yet philosophical character with whom she has a longstanding family tie. The upshot is that a spiral into madness and pain takes a gruesome turn as some gangsters find out that they’re just amateurs in horror compared to a London estate agent.   

Johnson, who co-wrote with Austin Collings, has made the serial killer drama Tony (2009), the corrupt cop picture Hyena and the ‘roid rage movie Muscle (2019). He’s the most underrated director currently working at the top of his game in Britain – his films home in on distinctly British (distinctly London) strands of lowlife which are explored with hallucinatory vividness which is at once near-surreal and as well-observed as the most rigorous exercise in social realism. He’s what you’d get if the Abel Ferrara of Bad Lieutenant and the Mike Leigh of Naked were fused. 

► Odyssey is in UK cinemas now.