Movie Review: “Normal”
Alice and I are now arguing about “Normal” (2026). It’s a small movie by director Ben Wheatley and writer Derek Kolstad that had its theatrical debut in March. As in all things having to do with movies, Alice is right and I’m probably not. It’s a negligible pile of filmic junk we saw together on Keith’s couch in Boston. The body count must be in the dozens and the finale is an unearned, feel-good reconciliation. In my heart of hearts, I know she’s right. Her standards are high and her critique was fierce.
The problem is that in my innermost heart of hearts, I liked Ben Wheatley’s movie a lot. It tells the story of a small town in Minnesota that agrees to serve as a depot for Japanese gangsters. The yakuza cut an irresistible deal. They will store gold and cash, munitions, and drugs (I think) in the vault in the basement of the Normal bank. In return they agree to arm everyone in town and pay a generous fee for community-wide security. Almost everyone agrees, and Normal is saved from small-town debility. That is until the arrival of interim sheriff Ulysses Richardson, played by the estimable Bob Odenkirk, who has trouble countenancing the unsavory arrangement.
What Alice overlooked (I think) was Odenkirk’s performance. Yes, indeed, the body count is high, with a fair degree of soulless sadism. Pinky fingers get chopped in that yakuza way, and a couple of heads are severed from their bodies. When the time comes to clean up the mess, Odenkirk casually calls for the scattered limbs. We see his predecessor being frozen to death for the sin of trying to escape the spider web. But because there is so much violence throughout and it is all exaggerated in both volume and tone, it doesn’t land as an instance of sick-o. Think of the wood-chipper scene in “Fargo,” that crazy comedy of fleshy slurry in the snow.
Odenkirk is clearly the master of this domain, with his raspy voice and gift of empathy. He arrives to function briefly as a sheriff, but he cannot resist the call of duty. His moral responses are supple and idiosyncratic as he navigates the uncertainty of good and evil, from a bank robber who loves her shabby dog to the elderly owner of a Normal yarn store who is a murderous tool of her yakuza overlords. There is an appealing fatalism in this restrained performance, a stoic acceptance that Ulysses may not make it back across the chasm. If he is rewarded at the end, it’s not that he has performed flawlessly, but kept his hands as clean as he can.
But Wheatley and Kolstad go just a little bit further with a look at big-time twenty-first century capitalism. Normal is linked improbably but inescapably to an international cabal of terrifying greed and a transactional web of hard obligation. Nothing is truly local anymore. Everything is tied to everything else. Rather than capitulate to the steamroller of Walmart and the tectonic forces that have wasted small-town America, Normal cuts a canny deal to save its bank, its diner and its well-stocked yarn store. It refuses to become Dollar General and a gutted main street of wheezing nail salons. You root for Normal even as it reveals its rottenness, its embedded aptitude for explosive violence. When old Mary Beth comes after Ulysses, half of you wants her to have her moment.
At the end of the day, of course, she dies, as do all the genuine malefactors in the town. It’s a nice clean story about a weird little place that loses its soul and is then put to rights. Alice was correct that this is a stupid movie. Marc may be right that there’s something else here and it may be really interesting to talk about.