A calm-loving middle-class woman becomes insomnia incarnate in Jed Hart’s darkly comical neighborhood nightmare
Maybe the only true way to review Jed Hart’s darkly funny feature debut, running at TIFF Romania’s Midnight Movie section, is in a state of total sleep deprivation. The very state at which his quiet and quiet-loving main character arrives. Geriatric nurse Nicky (a strong turn by Lyndsey Marshal) first loses sleep and then almost her mind. In the first scene she’s on a lonely road in the middle of the woods, ready to burry a bound victim alive. A lengthy flashback reveals the unobtrusive protagonist’s gradual descent into murderous madness, caused by an all too real and relatable chain of events.
A single mother of an adult son away at college, Nicky lives an unspectacular but reasonably content middle class existence. She does home yoga, adores her cat, listens to classical music and has a vague romance with equally square Kevin (Barry Ward). Until terror arrives in the British suburbs with her new neighbor Deano (Aston McAuley). As Deano’s blasting house warming party keeps Nicky from falling asleep, she politely asks him to turn it down. His instant response is to invite her in. If you can’t get your sensitive neighbor to bear the noise, make them one of the party people. But Nicky doesn’t want to get plastered with a smarmy semi-stranger and his crowd.
Her insistence for quiet promptly reveals that Deano’s manners are as loud as his music. He will fight for his self-granted right to party. “All night, every night”, as Nicky puts it when finally telling a clueless Kevin. Her wannabe male savior confronts Deano but is instantly defeated. Police direct Nicky’s noise complaint to the city council. The council is too busy to intervene and none of her other neighbors wants to get involved. Deano’s increased delight in his nightly racket reveals his sadistic side as he leaves dog shit on Nicky’s lawn, blackmails her and even kills her cat. The fact that Nicky’s late parents used to live next door adds another psychological twist.
A proximity associated with security and comfort turns into a marker of psychological torment. Thus, both opponents become more and more unhinged in their behavior. Style, tone and soundtrack prove essential to the plot. Slanted camera angles, blurry frames and intrusive closeups to convey Nicky’s mental decline. She sleeps in her car and seeks shelter at Kevin’s place. But such impermanent escapes have their own impact on her routine and overall stability. Her feelings of powerlessness and paranoia give the acoustic night terrors an almost surreal edge, as the sound exaggerates every sound Deano makes. Nights drag on in eerie, dimmed light. Daylight hours glimmer sickly in faded colors.
It’s a real-life horror combining equally excruciating situations: sleep deprivation – an actual form of torture often executed with hammering music – and a neighbor from hell. At closer scrutiny, Hart’s seemingly universal conflict touches upon issues of class, gender, and economic privilege. The calm that Nicky longs for doesn’t even exist in underclass neighborhoods with crowded, badly soundproofed living spaces and more noise pollution. Upper-class residents rarely have direct neighbors. Nicky has to get up early for work and can’t physically intimidate Deano. Even racism rears its head as Nicky makes Deano’s sole Black pal her first target. Disappointingly, a cowardly, anticlimactic ending replaces the impending escalation.
Was the director-writer simply too tired to devise something more convincing than this utterly unbelievable dea-ex-machina conclusion? Despite its unused potential, two effective lead performances and an effective set-up make for a suburban horror movie that leaves you just the right amount of restless.
- OT: Restless
- Director: Jed Hart
- Year: 2024
