Restless reviewed from Glasgow Film Festival 2025 for Sight and Sound, May 2025
A middle-aged woman, visibly upset, gets into her car at night, turns on some classical music, drives into secluded woodland, and gets out with a shovel to dig a grave. The opening sequence of Jed Hart’s Restless in fact comes near the film’s chronological end, announcing to viewers from the outset that what might otherwise seem a British kitchen-sink drama is eventually, inevitably headed somewhere darkly different. As will soon be discovered, this suburban siege thriller is also a black comedy about burying the past.
Cut to one week earlier, and it is hard to imagine Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) engaged in secret sylvan burials. When she is not working long hours at an understaffed nursing home, Nicky lives in a semi-detached house on an estate, treating herself to nights in spent all alone with lovingly homemade cakes and genteel snooker on TV. Now that both her parents, who used to live in the house next door, have recently died, and that her son Liam (voiced by Declan Adamson) has left for university, Nicky is an empty nester and a loner, communicating with her remaining family only by phone, while sharing space only with her beloved cat Reg. In other words, she is the becoming the archetypal ‘cat lady’. The elderly patients who are her sole human company, and her adoption of her late father’s favourite classical music which she had once abhorred, all point to a woman who is slipping prematurely towards her own solitary old age. All this will change when Deano (Aston McAuley), a chirpily antisocial thirty-something hedonist, moves into the now vacant house next door, bringing with him masculine menace and a floor-shakingly loud stereo deck.
Here restlessness comes with a double edge. Even as Deano and his friends’ all-night partying drives Nicky rapidly mad with insomnia and cracks her comfortable status quo, Deano is also the catalyst that shakes Nicky from her torpor. While Nicky’s sleeplessness may propel her back to the smoking that she gave up when pregnant two decades earlier, and eventually to uncharacteristically extreme, even unhinged criminality, it also stops her sleepwalking through her own shrinking existence. It’s what gets her out of the house and sends her fleeing into the awkward embrace of the similarly lonely Kevin (Barry Ward). In other words, Nicky’s sleep deprivation is also a kind of awakening, allowing Nicky to refashion herself as no longer merely the mother or daughter she once was, and to start enjoying a second life as her own person.
Pitched somewhere, in tone, theme and its vindictive protagonist’s sex, between Abner Pastoll’s A Good Woman is Hard to Find (2019) and Karl R. Hearne’s The G (2023), this social realist drama shifts to domestic terrorism, and eventually to joyful feminist emergence. Writer/director Hart’s debut feature (following the 2016 short film Candy Floss and some TV work) comes wrapped in an unexpected worm-that-turned revenge narrative, whose heroine, despite her initial stagnation, is after all not quite ready for the grave.
strap: In Jed Hart’s darkly comic neighbourhood war, revenge is a dish best served with chocolate sprinkles
Anton Bitel
