I pronounce it "Nor - MAHL", just to be different
dir: Ben Wheatley
2026
I mean, what even is ‘normal’ these days? Who do we allow to define it, and to whose benefit?
We aspire to free will, we like to think of ourselves as freethinkers who live their lives on their own terms, but we’re still mostly conforming sheep, too concerned about standing out in case we catch people’s notice and they say something about any aspect of our appearances, our clothing, how we do what we do. We are still herd animals, even when we think we’re all alphas loping across the plains majestically without a care in the world.
It’s fucking stultifying. And that’s part of the imagined joke here, that a town called Normal, in Minnesota, the absolute pinnacle of Minnesota Nice, might not be that normal a place at all. That what Americans consider ‘normal’ is a fucking abomination in disguise.
For a full half hour of this flick, I thought I’d completely misjudged it, as in, for its first half hour it seemed like it was a serious kind of film about someone who’d had a crisis of faith (in Justice!) just trying to get by and get along in a temporary gig as a small town’s sheriff. The sheriff, for all his world-weariness, played by the great Bob Odenkirk, of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame, chugs around this shitty little town being nice and polite to everyone, so as to rustle no feathers and cause no conflicts. Every shop, every establishment is called “Normal Savings and Loans”, “Normal Yarn & Twine”, “Normal Hardware”, you get the idea.
Everyone’s mostly polite, but this isn’t even about the hypocrisy of them being vampires or something fundamentally antithetical to the projected wholesome image of white picket fence Americana. In the very first few minutes of the movie we watch some Japanese yakuza bullshit happening in Osaka, where two (of three) lucky survivors are dispatched, missing a bit of their pinkie fingers, to the town of Normal. It’s not a jolly; it’s for work reasons.
Work reasons that are quite dumb. Ulysses, the sheriff, pieces together some odd things about the town during his travels, but the true magnitude of what’s happening behind the scenes eludes him until it becomes the plot front and centre, and he has to kill almost everyone in the town in order to not die.
I can’t claim to know Ben Wheatley personally, and this is not a thing I saw mentioned in any of the reviews of the movie that I saw, or something I’ve seen mentioned in interviews or promotional material, because, really, no one gave a fuck about this flick when it came out a month ago, and practically no one saw it. It will disappear, like most movies, into the streaming ether, and it will be one of the many flicks you flick past the next time you’re trying to decide to watch something.
All I can say about Ben Wheatley, as if I know anything about him or his motivations as a director, is that he’s English, and he’s made all sorts of different films about different topics, so you can’t pin him down to one aesthetic or one genre. He’s made visceral, grimy horror flicks, and slick corporate / class satires and full on big budget giant shark movies. And an adaptation of Rebecca for Netflix, because of course he did.
The not so subtle pisstake that he’s doing here that American audiences aren’t going to see but most people living outside of America might easily get is that he’s not saying “isn’t it terrible when a small town sells its collective soul to a criminal organisation / corporation, and then it degenerates into executions and murder?” What he’s really saying is “you weirdos think the way you live, with guns guns guns everywhere, shooting each other with such demented frequency, is normal, and it really isn’t.”
When I say that that’s what this flick is saying, I’m not saying it says that explicitly or through the plot of the film, or, you know, outside the voices in my head. The plot of the film says that normal people will do terrible things once money gets involved. The external position / standpoint might well be “maybe if you weren’t such gun nuts things like this wouldn’t happen.”
If the yakuza chose to pull a similar scam as this to take over a country town in, say, outback Australia, in order to launder their ill-gotten gains and protect it from government scrutiny for a time, who would even notice? And the most you’d have to fight is against the flies and maybe some emus.
You’d certainly not get a guy with a load of guns and eventually dynamite take on a town full of gun nuts, personally shooting and / or exploding most of them, then having to kill the survivors once the yakuza are through with them.
Because that wouldn’t be considered ‘normal’ anywhere else other than America.
I had also originally thought this flick came out of the insanity of a different Bob Odenkirk movie from last year, which was a second ill-advised instalment in his ongoing middle-aged murder man series Nobody. In that one a middle-aged murder man gets tired of murdering men and wants to go on a holiday. At this holiday destination, at a goofy nowhere town with a shitty water park, it’s revealed everyone is a criminal member of some enterprise, and the corrupt local sheriff (Colin Hanks) is corrupt and bad.
So I thought this flick was “what if middle-aged murder guy is the sheriff of the corrupt town”?
And, I guess it sort of is, but he’s also Gary Cooper in High Noon, which, now that I’ve typed that out, makes me think I must sound a hundred years old. Like, who’s even watched High Noon voluntarily in the last ten years who’s not your granddad?
Not me, but I do get the reference. A conflicted but ultimately noble chap stands up for himself and tries to save the unworthy residents of a terrible town pretending to be good people, all in the service of their Japanese masters.
Had this been made by an American I think there would have been more tension, more of a conflict with the locals being ill at ease over being lackeys for their Japanese criminal overlords. Here they’re happy as Larry about prostrating themselves like Pearl Harbor and WWII never happened.
Unreflective, unrepentant, oblivious and servile, just like their emperor would want them to be, and I’m not talking about Japan now. But anyway.
Once a couple of amateurs try to rob the local bank, everyone in the town loses their fucking minds collectively, and decide killing the sheriff and killing random passers-by is now okay, because that’s what the yakuza would want, although it doesn’t stop them from flying over to the town directly. They don’t even get to ask the yakuza directly, they just assume that’s what they would want. The movie transforms into a cartoon from this point on. I don’t mean it’s a somewhat comical action flick, I mean it’s gory, it’s insane, it’s nonsensical, it’s random, as in, a lot of people die randomly due to good luck on the protagonist’s part.
And then, because this film wants to pretend it’s not a cartoon, it gets ‘serious’ again when there’s a big plot reveal about what happened to the current interim sheriff’s predecessor. Sheriff Gunderson.
If that rings any bells it’s because for some reason there are some references to Fargo the Coen Brothers film rather than the series. There’s a few other references, but mostly they just lie there on the ground, inert, unmoving and unrelated to the flick we’re watching.
No, the real reason they keep saying Gunderson Gunderson Gunderson is because, as you would never be able to predict, the real reason that he was murdered is because he had a beloved child, who grew up, joined the military, decided they now wanted to live their truth as a trans man, and the town said “Nup, we don’t accept that, this town is called Normal, the yakuza wouldn’t like it.”
I… wow, I’m very conflicted about this plot element. I’m all for trans representation and such in movies, whether they’re quality movies or complete trash, but this cowardly shit doesn’t even have the courage of its convictions to actually articulate any of that. It infers, implies, indicates etc, but chickens the fuck out, though they’re happy to show people being stabbed in neck or through the eye with sharp objects, or blowing Henry Winkler up, or shooting people’s faces off.
What a world we live in, where it’s okay to brutally murder hundreds of people onscreen in the most senseless and meaningless of ways but filmmakers are too terrified to even say a character is trans because of the backlash they fear will ensue.
Bob Odenkirk does solid, weary work in this strange and cowardly film, but only really gets one knockdown drag-out decent fight with a yakuza goon, with the rest of it being fairly naff standard gun-based action, which can get dull if you’re not American but is mother’s milk if you are.
But I can’t really recommend this dumb flick. It wastes a lot of people, lot of decent actors who don’t get much to do, and had to spend all those weeks in Winnipeg making this *brrrr*. Your drunk dad would probably enjoy falling asleep in his recliner while watching it and drinking his seventh beer, but the rest of you (non-Americans) would be too sophisticated to enjoy this weak trash.
5 times Normal ain’t all it’s cracked up to be out of 10
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“If we don’t play this right, we’re going to have a massacre in there.” – uh, I thought that was the idea? - Normal
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