Normal, which screened Sunday at SXSW, has a familiar setup: There’s a new sheriff in town. Luckily, he’s played by Mr. Show, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul icon Bob Odenkirk, so you know he’s going to be complex and mine dark comedy in the weirdest places. The film is written by Odenkirk and Derek Kolstad, creator of John Wick, so you also know the writing will be tight, surprising, and, again, weirdly funny.
But I still wasn’t prepared for what a total delight Normal is. The film is not, as I’d feared, another thriller about a seemingly ordinary person who turns out to have a very particular set of skills, honed through countless killings he longs to forget — a genre so perfected by Liam Neeson, Odenkirk, Kolstad and others in recent years that it deserves a nice break.
Normal is different. Odenkirk plays a lawman unlike most we see in movies lately, in that he not only tends to de-escalate, but to de-escalate too much. He avoids conflict at every turn.
Until he can’t.
The first reel of the film is all setup, and the rest is payoff. Huge payoff. (I know sometimes people say “first reel” when they mean “first act,” but in this case, it was a literal reel — SXSW presented the film in 35mm, at Austin’s gorgeous Paramount Theatre, which added to the joy of the Normal experience.)
Director Ben Wheatley noted in his introduction that the film is a tight 90 minutes, so you won’t even need a bathroom break. He keeps things moving with elegance and glee.
Bob Odenkirk, Derek Kolstad and Ben Wheatley on Normal
The exquisite buildup sequence is packed with one Chekhov’s Gun after another. The phrase refers to the dramatic principal that every element of a story, no matter how seemingly innocuous, must later come into play.
“You plant a seed to bring to creative harvest,” Kolstad explained in a Q&A after the sceening.
Odenkirk shares a story credit with Kolstad, who wrote the script. The actor explained in the Q&A that his biggest contribution to the writing process was contributing to the the setups as his character, Ulysses, gets to know Normal, a forgotten Minnesota town with an odd mix of empty storefronts and incongruously vast wealth.
“I was able to contribute to the first part of the piece, which was the part where the town is funky, something’s weird, and it’s kind of funny, and the people are kind of cute, but not — there’s something wrong,” Odenkirk explained. “Derek is very open minded to people going, ‘What about this?’ ‘What about that?’ And so I’ve always felt very free to talk to him about ideas.”
“Iron sharpens iron,” Kolstad added. “Best idea wins.”
Normal originated when Kolstad and Odenkirk were working together on 2021’s Nobody, the film that launched Odenkirk as an action hero after decades in comedy and then years in TV drama. During a break in filming Nobody, Odenkirk asked Kolstad, who wrote the film, what else he was working on.
They developed Normal with producer Marc Provissiero, and all agreed to executive produce. When they finished work on last year’s Nobody 2 in Winnipeg, they quickly rolled into filming Normal, even as temperatures dropped in the Canadian city. The cold weather is integral to the film’s setting, and the atmospheric beauty of its bloody, imaginative action scenes.
In writing the town and townspeople of Normal, Odenkirk was inspired by both Garrison Keillor’s 1985 novel Lake Wobegon Days and the 1971 small-town black comedy Cold Turkey, directed by Norman Lear. Kolstad, meanwhile, was inspired by the Rube Goldberg killings of the Final Destination movies.
So if you need a quick summary of Normal, you could go with Lake Woebegon Days meets Final Destination, in the best way possible. Then factor in the weather.
Kolstad is from Wisconsin and Odenkirk from Illinois, so both know bone-chilling midwestern winters. Wheatley, who is British, thought he was ready for the even harsher winters of Winnipeg, but he was wrong. The temperatures dropped below 30 degrees during production.
“My Canadian friends were warning, ‘It’s gonna be cold. It’s gonna be cold,'” Wheatley recalled. He remembered thinking. Yeah, whatever.
“And then when we shot the scenes in the town, I remember walking out from my warmed up little trailer area and just feeling almost like my nose started crackling as it froze all the hairs, and I turned around and everyone had frost on their eyelashes,” Wheatley laughed.
He was drawn to Normal by the talent involved, but also by the chance to work in a new genre. He moves fluidly from comedy to thrillers to horror, and Normal has elements of all. But he liked that the film, while set in the Midwest, is very much a Western.
“It’s a Neo-Western, it’s a sheriff in town. And I was so excited about that. And then once I read the script, it’s this mixture of kind of the propulsive narrative, but also the kind of industrial accidents that happen within the story, which really works. There’s a variety to it, but also randomness to it, which I really love.”
Normal arrives in theaters April 16 from Magnolia Pictures. You can read more of our SXSW coverage here.
Main image: Bob Odenkirk in Ulysses in Normal. Magnolia Pictures.