[This story contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey.]
For a film stacked with A-listers like Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya and Tom Holland, one actor took up a surprising chunk of The Odyssey’s pre-release buzz: Samantha Morton. This was due in large part to director Christopher Nolan himself. “There are no limitations on her performance,” the Oscar-winning filmmaker told The Los Angeles Times earlier this month. “After one of her takes, the crew gave her a great round of applause…. The last time that had happened [in one of my movies] was with Heath Ledger on The Dark Knight.” You can’t hype up a performance much more than that.
Fortunately, Morton lives up to it. In a barnburning sequence as Circe, the witch goddess from Aeaea, the actress all but transforms the energy of the entire, massive film. Circe welcomes the survivors among Odysseus’s men who have washed up on a mysterious beach and seek refuge. Sensing their feral desperation, she promptly turns them all into pigs — a sequence achieved by Nolan with dazzling practicality. It’s only after Odysseus (Damon) himself kills a man disguised as a deer that he convinces her to change them back. She then, in a monologue delivered with singular verve by Morton, lays out the dangerous path for him to return to Ithaca and reunite with his family.
