Ben Wheatley and Bob Odenkirk make for a terrific duo in the action-packed Normal.
There’s something immediately off about the town of Normal. The lawns in the town are too neat. The smiles from the townsfolk are too wide. Everyone is too friendly. It feels less like a town and more like an advertisement for a real estate company, or an old-school style family sitcom — and that’s an idea that director Ben Wheatley leans into with gleeful, blood-soaked precision.
Pulling from the DNA of 1970s paranoid thrillers, the voyeuristic unease of Alfred Hitchcock, and the stylized excess of Brian De Palma, Normal is a genre chimera. It’s part action film, part western, part mystery, and part comedy, and all layered over a distinctly 1950s American façade that feels both nostalgic and sinister. The result is a film that understands that the fundamental truth of small towns is that they are built on secrets, and those secrets can break the foundation of everything really quickly.
At the center of it all is Bob Odenkirk, continuing what might be one of the most satisfying career evolutions in recent memory. His turn as Ulysses Richardson, an “interim sheriff” who drifts from town to town like a gunslinger of the old days, feels like a natural extension of what he began in Nobody. Nobody introduced Odenkirk as a believable action lead, but Normal cements him as something of a deadpan, durable force at the center of controlled chaos.
You can’t predict the directions Normal will go.
Ulysses Richardson arrives in the snow-draped town of Normal, Minnesota, expecting quiet. What he finds instead is a community that’s a little too ready for violence. The sheriff’s department is heavily armed, the mayor (a perfectly disarming Henry Winkler) is overly eager, and the townsfolk themselves? Well, let’s just say that they’re all in on something.
When the film’s central crux is revealed — something you’ll have to watch and see to believe — it sends the plot into something unthinkable. But it’s exactly that unthinkable quality that is the point. Screenwriter Derek Kolstad (best known for the creation of the John Wick franchise) builds a world where the rules are consistent but heightened, where loyalties are shifting constantly, and where sudden violence feels like an inevitability.
The first half of Normal plays like a wry, offbeat mystery, laced with a kind of Paul Thomas Anderson-style humor and creeping sense of anxiety. Then, on a perfect cue, the film explodes. What follows in an extended second half is relentless, in-your-face action — gunfights, dismemberments, and a standout shootout that will take your breath away.
An unhinged blend of genres.
The grounded nature of the violence stands out. Wheatley prioritizes in-camera action whenever possible, giving the chaos a tangible weight. You feel every hit, every shot, and every messy and uncomfortable moment (there is definitely some gore that is not for the squeamish).
Visually, the film makes a striking use of its wintry setting, transforming a typically warm, dusty western framework into something colder and, in turn, more isolating. It’s a nice inversion of the expected; furthermore, it’s proof that the setting of the “frontier” is less about location and more about places where law and order fray.
Normal isn’t trying to outdo the shock or novelty of other films within its genre, or even other Odenkirk action films like Nobody, and the restraint of that works in its favor. Rather than escalate and risk outstaying its welcome, it settles into a tight 90-minute film where humor, bloodshed, and pastiche collide in ways that feel unhinged in the most entertaining of ways.
Normal arrives in theaters April 17. Watch the trailer below.
Images courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
REVIEW RATING
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Normal - 8/10
8/10
Writer, educator, and unapologetic vampire enthusiast with a BA in Education, a BA in English Literature and Writing (plus a minor in film and history), and an MA in progress in English with a focus on storytelling across multiple mediums, she explores the dark and delicious corners of fiction — especially anything that bites. Find her on X: @kirstenlsaylor; Instagram: @kirstensaylor
