Normal starts with a bang. And by bang, I mean dudes casually cutting off their fingers like it’s a Tuesday. It immediately signals the movie’s vibe, and yeah, it instantly brought to mind that unhinged Tarantino segment from Four Rooms. From the opening moments, you know this thing is not going to play it straight.
This is a cold, cozy action movie. If that sounds weird, that’s because it is. The town itself feels like it wandered in from Hot Fuzz, all smiles and small talk with something deeply off bubbling under the surface. There’s a mystery baked into Normal that keeps you leaning forward, scanning faces, waiting for the mask to slip.
Bob Odenkirk’s presence does a lot of the heavy lifting early on. The voiceover gives us a direct line into his head, letting us sit with his inner monologue as curiosity slowly turns into concern, concern into dread. It’s effective in an unsettling way. The more he notices, the more uncomfortable it gets. You’re not just watching him think, you’re feeling the implications of those thoughts.
The characters are genuinely interesting, which helps a lot during the slower first act. Everyone feels slightly off, like they’re hiding something or just choosing not to say it out loud. The random dialogue is sneaky funny. Not joke machine funny, but weird, unexpected lines that sneak up on you and make you giggle before you realize why.
The soundtrack absolutely rules. Comfy old Americana tunes playing over mounting tension is a great choice, and when Dr. Hook comes in, it genuinely adds to the experience. There’s something about familiar, warm music clashing against violence and paranoia that makes everything feel just a little wrong in the best way.
The action really kicks in about thirty minutes in, and once it does, it goes hard. Like, unreasonably hard. There’s a stretch where it almost feels like a spoof Assault on Precinct 13, cranked up and injected with Ben Wheatley’s chaotic energy. Every death somehow manages to outdo the last. It keeps escalating to the point where you stop trying to guess how the next person is going to die and sit back and enjoy the ride.
It’s stupid fun. And I mean that as a compliment.
For fans of John Wick and Nobody, this will absolutely scratch that itch, but weirdly enough, I think I preferred Normal at times. It doesn’t want to be another slick assassin power fantasy. It’s fun and dumb enough to stay entertaining, even when things get a little repetitive. I appreciated that it wasn’t just trying to be a sexy action clone beat for beat.
The movie throws a lot of twists your way. Most of them are fairly predictable, but that doesn’t really hurt the experience because it’s fun watching everything unfold. And then, just when you think you’ve got the film pegged, the ending swerves hard out of left field. It’s messy, unexpected, and again, stupid fun. Totally in line with the rest of the movie.
From a technical standpoint, this thing rips. The camera work is excellent, and every action sequence gets room to shine. There’s a gunfight here that legitimately rivals classics like Hard Boiled. Blood effects are gnarly and impressively real. At one point, blood squirting out of a body made me pause and think, yeah, that definitely looked real enough to make some viewers uncomfortable.
Ben Wheatley has come a long way, but Normal still carries his trademark tone, and I truly appreciate that. It feels polished without losing his weird edge.
I missed this at SXSW, but I did spot Bob Odenkirk walking around downtown Austin while I was stuck on a shuttle. Seeing Normal now just made me wish I’d caught it with an SXSW crowd because this movie would absolutely play like gangbusters in that environment.
Normal isn’t subtle, it isn’t delicate, and it definitely isn’t normal. But it’s a blast. Dumb, bloody, cozy chaos, exactly how I like it.
Jessie Hobson