Restless – Glasgow Film Festival 2025 Review
After her father’s recent death, and her son leaving for university, Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) is on her own for the first time in many years. Though she misses them both dearly, she has a lot of peaceful activities – yoga, baking, listening to classical music – to keep her busy between her shifts as an underpaid, overworked carer.
But then Dean (Aston McAuley) moves in next door, and her life becomes a nightmare. Every night he and his gang party so loud their shared wall vibrates. When she asks him to turn the music down, he turns it up louder. The police aren’t interested. The council won’t do anything. The neighbours are too scared to get involved. And Nicky is getting no sleep. Desperate and furious, eventually, she is driven to drastic action.
If you have ever had the miserable experience of being awake in the middle of the night, knowing you have to be up for work in a couple of hours, and that sleep isn’t going to come, Restless – the debut feature from writer/director Jed Hart – will feel uncomfortably familiar to you. Terrible neighbours aside, the film has a terrific grasp of the physicality of insomnia; the clammy dread, the woozy feeling in your stomach, the way your hold on reality is both heightened and softened; on several occasions, it’s hard to tell if Nicky is dreaming or if she’s awake. Because Hart and Lyndsey Marshal are so good as establishing her fraught state, you genuinely believe that Nicky is capable of anything as the action escalates, which makes the climactic act particularly exciting.
Although the primary tone is one of tension, the movie also boasts a rich vein of dark comedy. This largely comes courtesy of the wonderful Barry Ward, playing Kev: an old friend of Nicky’s who becomes her sole ally (albeit, a not very helpful one!). Essentially sweet-natured, but not always that sensitive, every other line of his is a gem – “Christ himself couldn’t have made a better buffet!”, he reports his mum saying about the food at Nicky’s dad’s funeral; “You find a lot of bodies in the parking enforcement game…” an evocative aside about his day job. The easy sliding between tones gives the film a delightful confidence.
Because the house that Dean’s moved into used to belong to her parents, Nicky still has a key – when she uses it to enter the property and try and stop the noise herself, the film creeps into horror movie territory.
And that horror, albeit on a more macro level, is the film’s presiding note. Although Restless is both a thrilling ride and a fun one, Hart layers underneath both of those more palatable tones one of state-of-the-nation despair. This is a cold world, where the institutions that exist to help society are uncaring or underfunded or both, neighbours don’t have basic consideration for one another, and when there’s an issue, you can’t rely on anyone for assistance (except Kev, but he’s pretty useless, bless him!). While it’s not exactly a work of stark social realism a la Ken Loach, there’s an unmistakable bleakness to Hart’s vision that lingers in the brain afterwards.
In fact, it’s enough to keep you up at night…
★★★★
