The movie with the intriguing title “A Writer’s Odyssey” is one of those that echoes in the mind long after the film is over – and the more I think about it, the more impressed I am. This is not the movie version of a book; rather, it is a movie about the writing of a book, where events in the real world and in the novel are cleverly intertwined.
The protagonists include:
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A struggling young writer who survives by sponging off his mother while sharing on the internet successive chapters of the fantasy novel he is currently writing. He is running out of ideas for his story.
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A powerful bullying tech tycoon with skeletons in his closet who wants the writer’s novel stopped because he is obsessed with the belief that it is somehow destroying his health.
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The tycoon’s female Chief Information Officer who happens to have the combat skills of a Navy Seal. While outwardly as hard as nails, she carries psychological scars from having been abandoned by her parents when she was a child.
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A desperate father who has been frantically searching for his lost daughter for the last 6 years, pursuing the person who abducted her. His dreams are troubled by disquieting visions of his lost daughter trapped in a far-off fantastic land.
At the beginning of the movie, the father finally catches up to the child abductor who 6 years earlier stole his then-4 year-old daughter. But instead of learning about his daughter’s whereabouts, the father gets beaten up – and then the police arrive and arrest him as a suspected child kidnapper. The desperate father escapes from police custody … and runs straight into the tycoon’s waiting CIO who mysteriously knows all about him. She offers him a deadly deal – the tycoon’s company will use its vast resources to find his lost daughter … but the price is first he has to kill the writer.
During the father’s reluctant pursuit of the writer, the writer accidentally comes into possession of the father’s diary with its descriptions of his dreams about the foreboding city in which his missing daughter is trapped. That refires the writer’s creative imagination – and the father and his missing daughter become characters in the novel. Can father & daughter somehow be reunited?
As the unintended relationship between hunter and hunted develops, the father finds himself in a deepening dilemma, torn between his drive to find his daughter and his reluctance about killing the writer. But the CIO will not let the father wriggle out of the deal, as the tech tycoon keeps hounding her to ensure that the father kills the writer.
The continuing story in the novel becomes an evolving allegory for the ongoing struggles of father & writer in the real world, where there are monsters just as nasty as those in the fantasy novel. While the movie probably overdoes some of the action scenes, as a bibliophile I have to admire its choice to set the climactic scene in … a library!
This movie lies at the intersection of drama, fantasy, and action. It is very well made, with the real-world sequences often filmed in the rain, helping to convey the father’s feelings of desperation and despair. The fantasy novel sequences with their special effects are visually astonishing. Plot development is excellent, with a number of surprises. Still, the movie could have been better if it had put more emphasis on the drama than the action.
