Normal is inspired by the creative partnership between actor Bob Odenkirk and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, whose collaboration on Nobody and its sequel forged a shared language blending humour, brutality, and character‑driven stakes.
The film’s narrative, centred on Ulysses, a temporary sheriff seeking refuge from his own past in the seemingly quiet town of Normal, Minnesota, becomes a study in how violence, corruption, and buried secrets metastasise beneath the surface of American small‑town mythology. What begins as a simple assignment spirals into a violent confrontation with a conspiracy involving local law enforcement, ordinary citizens, and a criminal network tied to the Yakuza, transforming the town into a pressure cooker where every friendly face hides a weapon and every gesture of hospitality conceals a threat.
Ulysses, a temporary sheriff looking to disappear, arrives in the quiet town of Normal, only to be pulled into a violent bank robbery that exposes a criminal network woven through the community. As he digs deeper, he discovers that Normal is riddled with corruption, its citizens entangled in a conspiracy linked to the Yakuza. Forced into escalating violence and betrayal, Ulysses becomes the town’s only line of defense, confronting both its darkness and the past he hoped to escape.
The film is directed by Ben Wheatley, whose eclectic body of work, from Kill List to Free Fire to High‑Rise, demonstrates a fascination with chaos, violence, and the breakdown of social order. His direction amplifies the film’s themes by refusing to romanticise violence; instead, he presents it as messy, disorienting, and morally corrosive. His collaboration with Kolstad results in a film that is both structurally tight and aesthetically chaotic, a tension that gives Normal its distinctive tone.
The screenplay, written by Derek Kolstad, is shaped by his instinct for blending genre mechanics with emotional stakes
Kolstad structures the narrative as a descent into a labyrinth: each revelation exposes a deeper layer of corruption, each confrontation forces Ulysses to confront not only the town’s secrets but his own. The story is built on a simple but potent engine, a botched bank robbery that exposes a hidden criminal operation, and from there expands into a violent unravelling of the town’s social fabric.
Kolstad’s writing emphasizes the improvisational nature of survival: characters use whatever is at hand, environments become weapons, and action sequences unfold with a sense of chaotic ingenuity. His scenes often begin with clarity, become murky in the middle, and end with a sharp, staccato beat, a rhythm he has described as essential to both comedy and action. This structural discipline ensures that the film’s escalating violence never becomes shapeless; instead, it builds toward a crescendo that feels both inevitable and shocking.
Kolstad crafted the screenplay by returning to the core principles that define his writing: character before choreography, emotional stakes before spectacle, and a narrative engine built on escalation, consequence, and moral pressure.
His process begins with the protagonist’s wound, Ulysses, a man seeking anonymity in a town whose name promises safety, and Kolstad builds outward from that psychological fracture, ensuring that every plot turn is an extension of the character’s internal conflict rather than a mechanical genre requirement.
He writes in layers: first mapping the emotional spine, then the structural beats, then the action architecture that expresses character through movement, improvisation, and environment. Kolstad’s inspiration for Normal comes from his fascination with men who are not superheroes but survivors, ordinary, bruised, morally compromised figures who navigate violence with reluctance rather than swagger.
His Midwestern roots inform the setting: small towns that appear calm but hide rot beneath the surface, communities where politeness masks corruption, and where violence erupts not as spectacle but as the inevitable result of pressure, secrecy, and fear. In crafting the screenplay, Kolstad uses his signature “pressure‑cooker” structure: a simple inciting incident, a bank robbery gone wrong, reveals a deeper conspiracy, each revelation tightening the noose around the protagonist until action becomes the only language left.
He writes action the way comedians write timing: setup, disruption, reversal, punchline, except the punchline is a broken bone or a desperate escape. His scenes are built around clarity and chaos in equal measure, clear objectives, chaotic execution, because he believes action should feel like survival, not choreography.
Kolstad’s collaboration with Bob Odenkirk also shapes the script; he writes with Odenkirk’s rhythms in mind, crafting dialogue that is clipped, self‑effacing, and edged with regret, and action that relies on improvisation, exhaustion, and the physical vulnerability that made Nobody so compelling.
The screenplay is also influenced by Kolstad’s love of noir: morally ambiguous towns, compromised institutions, and protagonists who discover that the place they hoped would save them is the place that will destroy them. He structures Normal as a descent, each scene peeling back another layer of the town’s corruption, each confrontation revealing how deeply the criminal network has infiltrated the community, until the town itself becomes the antagonist.
Kolstad’s writing process is architectural: he outlines meticulously, then rewrites with increasing compression, stripping dialogue to its bone structure and letting silence, gesture, and environment carry meaning. He avoids exposition by embedding information in conflict, characters reveal themselves through what they want, what they fear, and what they’re willing to do when cornered. His action sequences are written as emotional beats, not technical descriptions; he focuses on intention, stakes, and outcome, trusting the director and stunt team to translate those beats into physical form.
What makes Normal significant within Kolstad’s body of work is its blend of noir fatalism, small‑town paranoia, and character‑driven violence, a synthesis that allows him to explore themes of identity, reinvention, and the impossibility of outrunning one’s past. In the end, Kolstad crafts the screenplay by doing what he does best: building a world where violence is never empty, where every punch carries psychological weight, and where the protagonist’s journey is not toward victory but toward truth, however brutal that truth may be.
Derek Kolstad is a screenwriter and creator best known for shaping modern action cinema through his work on the John Wick franchise, where his stripped‑down storytelling, emotional clarity, and precision‑engineered action sequences helped redefine the genre. His writing blends noir fatalism with character‑driven stakes, focusing on ordinary men pushed into extraordinary violence. Kolstad’s scripts are built around momentum, improvisation, and the psychological cost of survival, qualities that have made him one of the most influential action writers of the last decade. In Normal (2026), he collaborates again with Bob Odenkirk, crafting a tense, pressure‑cooker narrative set in a small town where corruption runs deep, and violence becomes the only language left. Kolstad’s work remains marked by structural discipline, tonal intelligence, and a fascination with the fragile line between justice and vengeance.
Bob Odenkirk is an actor, writer, and producer whose career spans sketch comedy, prestige drama, and, in a remarkable late‑career pivot, action cinema. After decades of acclaim for his sharp comedic instincts on Mr. Show and his layered dramatic work as Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Odenkirk reinvented himself with the action thriller Nobody, revealing a physical intensity and emotional vulnerability that reshaped his public persona. His work is defined by intelligence, timing, and a deep understanding of flawed, morally complex men. In Normal (2026), Odenkirk continues this evolution, co‑developing the story and embodying a protagonist shaped by regret, resilience, and the quiet desperation of a man trying—and failing—to outrun his past. His creative partnership with writer Derek Kolstad has become one of the most compelling actor‑writer collaborations in contemporary genre filmmaking.
