Restless ★★★★

Released: Friday 4th April 2025

Directed: Jed Hart

Cast: Lyndsey Marshal, Aston McAuley, Barry Ward

For the audience, Restless lasts a mere 89 minutes. For main character Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal), it’s only one week of her life. Despite these relatively short sentences, Jed Hart’s tremendous thriller feels like, in the best way, an eternity of tension and tautness, where Nicky’s suffering at the hands of her noisy neighbour seems to go on and on with no end in sight. Restless is a war of attrition between Nicky and Deano (Aston McAuley), and for us, it is a brilliantly unbearable, suspenseful watch that is impossible to look away from.

Care worker Nicky lives a peaceful existence, spending her time out of work listening to classical music, baking cakes, and spending time with her beloved cat, Reggie. Through phone calls with her sister, we learn that their parents have recently passed away, leaving their semi-detached house that links to Nicky’s empty—but not for long. The trouble in Restless starts almost instantly: Nicky peers out of her window and sees Deano, a man in his early thirties, moving in. Later that night, party music pounds throughout the night, leaving Nicky, as the title suggests, severely restless.

And so the torture continues. Despite initially polite requests for the music to be turned down, the noise continues each night, and the reluctance of other neighbours to get involved leaves Nicky feeling anxious and isolated, even before Deano’s increasingly aggressive behaviour. Perhaps most impressively, Restless never feels repetitive, despite the setting and story having this potential. Hart, who also wrote the screenplay, adds variation to each scenario and employs subversive tangents to the story in the way that Nicky reacts to her situation. Yes, Restless is far-fetched and perhaps too neat in its ending, but this doesn’t feel too at odds with its frequent black comedy tone.

The shining star at the centre of Restless is Marshal, who gives a perfect performance of increasing anxiety, bubbling rage, and deep depression. Her descent into insanity is subtle and well-measured, and therefore realistic, which is necessary considering some of Restless’s jaunts into the surreal or melodramatic. McAuley is also terrific—or more accurately, completely despicable—as the obnoxious Deano; it’s a necessarily over-the-top performance of machismo, and McAuley rules the screen with an unpredictable energy whenever he is on it.

As Nicky’s sleepless nights continue, her deteriorating mindset is captured in tremendous detail and vividity by Hart, DOP David Bird, and editor Anna Meller. The two worlds—Nicky’s peaceful life and Deano’s chaos—collide in increasingly interesting ways, with the deafening energy of the latter’s seeping not just through the walls of the house, but into Nicky’s psyche. Rachmaninov and house music bleed together; Nicky’s warm living room lamps flash like they are in a nightclub. Everything about these moments are swift and energetic, perfectly encapsulating Nicky’s struggles.

Whilst Hart does build background for the main character, he doesn’t do quite enough to fully mesh her history with her present. We know she struggles with isolation after her parent’s death, exasperated by Deano, but the actual nuts and bolts of this trauma isn’t delved into deep enough. However, that would have made Restless a very different film. As it is, Hart’s feature directorial debut is a thriller unmatched by few this year; you’ll find yourself wanting to look away, but it will be impossible to do so.