The Plot: After the death of her mother in the semi-detached house next door, Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) finds herself without much in the way of company. She goes to work as a caregiver as usual, but one day comes home to find new neighbours have moved in. Noisy ones. Deano (Aston McAuley) and his mates play loud music at all hours. Unable to sleep, Nicky is at her wits end. The other residents nearby don’t want to get involved, so Nicky takes the situation into her own hands…
The Verdict: Neighbours… everybody needs good neighbours. Well, except the ones that have moved in next door and show little regard for the residents around them. That’s where middle-aged main character Nicky finds herself in something of a sticky situation in low-budget British indie Restless. It’s the feature debut of writer-director Jed Hart and focuses on the lengths people will go to get a good night’s sleep and some peace and quiet. It appears to be a reflection of the modern malaise of growing anti-social behaviour being left unchecked and unchallenged for fear of unwanted consequences. It also taps into the limits of reactionary behaviour and how that also needs to be kept in check.
Restless is an odd little film in that it presents the audience with a relatable, everyday problem with a solution early on… but makes it look like the main character has no choice but to respond with sledgehammer subtlety. Nicky calls the police about Deano’s hard-partying all-night, every night but they just bat her off to the local council. When the noise gets so unbearable that she parks her car by the sea and sleeps there overnight, she encounters friendly Council worker Kevin (our own Barry Ward) but doesn’t seek his help. Instead, she resorts to the kind of risky, dubious behaviour that frequently sends the moral compass spinning and creates a conflicting action/reaction result. Deano is just an irritating nuisance, but Nicky’s reaction to that is a bit of trespass here, a bit of criminal damage to property there, even the kind of icky baking with a smile from The Help.
Hart’s script is very matter-of-fact about all this, but it has the effect of undermining sympathy for Nicky herself. One could put her increasingly erratic behaviour down to stress and the torturous effect of sleep deprivation, but that’s not enough to paper over the gaping holes in plot logic here. Hart just keeps widening those holes as the plot becomes more and more convoluted. Kevin re-enters the story later on as a tentative romance grows but it doesn’t go anywhere in particular, which is a shame as Ward is comfortably the best thing about the film. The performances are competent enough and there are some brief flashes of creaking tension but when the movie accounting is done on it, it just doesn’t add up as a fully-formed narrative. Hart shows some potential, but he really needed to tap into that nervy suburban life vibe that Mike Leigh and Ben Wheatley have done so well in the past.
Rating: 2 / 5
Review by Gareth O’Connor
