Starring Lyndsey Marshal, Aston McAuley

Written & Directed by Jed Hart

Thunderbird Releasing, in cinemas now

An exhausted care-worker is driven to dangerous fury by her noisy new neighbours.

‘What’s the point of genre?’ I pondered to myself as Neighbours-From-Hell thriller, quasi-horror, quasi-comedy, Restless, started to fall apart in its final act.

It had all begun so well. Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal), an overworked care assistant at an old people’s home, lives on a rundown housing estate in a rundown seaside town somewhere in the rundown north of England. She’s lonely. Her son has just started at uni, and the house next door, which used to belong to her parents before they died, is empty… until Deano (Aston MacAuley) moves in. Deano’s a party animal, raving with his friends at full volume until dawn every night. Deprived of sleep, Nicky starts to go mad from exhaustion, losing her moral compass, her world distorting around her.

For anyone who has endured a noisy and selfish neighbour it’s a convincing and stressful watch, certainly for the first hour. Lyndsey Marshal is on top form as Nicky, sympathetic but also spiteful, her impulsive desire for revenge sowing the seeds for her own downfall. Aston McAuley is persuasively intimidating as the oafish, angry Deano.

The point of genre is that it lays out a movie’s stall, it tells the us what the rules are, it fuels our expectations. If battle lines are drawn where sanity has gone out of the window, death threats are made, and lethal weaponry is easily and obviously available, then, like Chekhov’s Gun, if what they promise goes unfulfilled, an audience will feel cheated.

What is particularly frustrating about writer/director Jed Hart’s debut feature is that he easily, even skillfully earns the right to go full-on horror. I, for one, would have been cheering. Instead, just as Nicky’s journey reaches its angry climax, he effectively says ‘only kidding!’ and the movie degenerates into quirky, and sadly rather lame comedy, made even more disappointing because the two lop-sided denouements not only dissipate the tension, but are annoyingly staged between the wrong characters.

It’s fine to play with genre. In a movie like All My Friends Hate Me the fake horror tropes are exploited to fantastic effect to illuminate the central character’s millennial paranoia. In Restless it just looks as if the project is copping out.

Verdict: Restless could have been a genuinely arresting low budget thriller horror. It desperately needed an experienced script editor to guide Hart to honour the narrative and genre promises he makes to a willing audience, who, having seen the poster, are hoping for blood and scares that never come. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com