If there’s one thing you can predict about Ben Wheatley, it’s that he’s unpredictable. Last year the British filmmaker took weirdo lo-fi romp Bulk to festivals. This year, he’s coming in all guns blazing with action-comedy Normal, which receives its U.S. premiere at this week’s South by Southwest. “They’re all a bit of a change from each other,” said Wheatley.
That’s an understatement. Wheatley’s filmography has gone from gritty, micro-budget thrillers (Down Terrace) to psychedelic mystical dramas (In the Earth) to star-studded Hollywood blockbusters (Free Fire) but it’s not been a simple trajectory from indie filmmaking to studio work. After all, he shot Bulk and Normal back-to-back, and he could manage that shift “because they exist in different ecosystems. The people asking me to make Meg 2 are not the same people watching A Field in England.”
If he has his way, Wheatley will keep up that kind of ricochet. He said, “I’m very envious of the studio directors of the Forties and Fifties, when you would get on assignment and you’d do a gangster film and a cowboy movie and a courtroom drama and romance and a musical. You turn up to work and you’re doing four or five movies in a year and it sounds like the most amazing time to be alive.”
With Normal, he gets to revisit the classic era of Westerns, back when there weren’t really black hats and white hats, just shades of gray. In this action-comedy from John Wick co-creator Derek Kolstad, disillusioned lawman Ulysses (Bob Odenkirk) is filling in as temporary sheriff of Normal, Minnesota. It’s a quiet place, but some things just gnaw away at Ulysses: Everyone’s too polite, too well-armed, and there’s just a little too much money floating around for a flyspeck in the snowy middle of nowhere.
It was Kolstad and Odenkirk’s first collaboration, 2021 action smash Nobody, that got Wheatley interested in the project. He said, “Nobody came at exactly the right time after COVID. It felt like a welcome back to the cinema, and a welcome back to a grounded action and an older cinema which had been missing for a long time.”
It was also the introduction of Odenkirk as an action star, but not an invulnerable one. What he pulls off in Nobody, its sequel, and Normal “is somewhat achievable,” Wheatley said, “if you ever bothered to do any exercise.” It’s a style reminiscent of Seventies and early Eighties action, the era of “the vulnerable hero. … There’s something about Harrison Ford in his performances that always showed that he was hurting. Clint Eastwood, even in the Dirty Harry movies, Unforgiven, A Fistful of Dollars, they take a kicking and they have to come back, and that’s part of you feeling that they’re human, rather than wraiths who can take any amount of damage.”
When it came to making Normal feel real, he said, “what was agreed on by everyone from the start was that it would be as physical and as practical as possible. If the computer was got out of the box, it was only to clean something up. … Things, when they blow up, they blow up. When we flip a car, we flip a car. It’s cause and effect, it’s physics. The audience can see how one thing affects another, which on one hand is more realistic but on the other it’s Tom & Jerry.”
Normal
Narrative Spotlight, U.S. Premiere
Sunday 15, 5:45pm, Paramount Theatre
Wednesday 18, 6:30pm, Alamo Lamar
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.
