Can't Get No Sleep: Meet the director and star of Restless

Hollywood thrillers aren’t very relatable, are they? Not many people can claim to have been behind the wheel of a bus rigged to explode if its speed drops below 50 miles per hour or hired to infiltrate multiple layers of a person's dream to surreptitiously plant an idea inside their mind. But pretty much everyone will have some familiarity with the setup of British thriller Restless, the debut feature from Jed Hart. It’s about a middle-aged woman who’s driven to increasingly insane levels of distraction by an obnoxiously noisy neighbour. 

Hart’s script grew out of his own nightmare experience. “I had these terrible neighbours above me, and they used to keep me awake,” he tells me on a visit to Glasgow Film Festival for Restless’s UK premiere. “I’d just lie there at night, staring at the ceiling with my own disturbing thoughts of revenge, and just think, this could be a great movie.” He began to rack his brains for other films built around this premise; there are surprisingly few of them. “The only one I could think of was that comedy with Zac Efron [Bad Neighbours]. I just thought it was such an interesting pressure cooker environment to place a character.”

That character is Nicky (played by Lyndsey Marshal), an overworked care worker who finds herself with an empty nest – her son has left for uni – and an empty house next door, which used to belong to her parents, who have both recently passed away. She’s somewhat lonely but seems to be enjoying the solitude with only her cat, Radio 3 and some calming meditation tapes for company. Her respite is short-lived, though, when Deano (Aston McAuley), a 30-something party animal whose motto is ‘he’ll sleep when he’s dead’, moves in next door, and spends his nights partying with his equally antisocial pals, playing bone-rattling music through the walls.

Marshal joins us and explains that Nicky’s bubbling emotions attracted her to the part. “Nicky was vulnerable: her son's gone off to university, her parents have recently died. Without even having time to process that next part of her life, these neighbours move in and they bully her, and it’s an arrow straight to her heart.” That's not to say Nicky is some doormat, though. She’s initially intimidated by the thuggish Deano, but when her other neighbours provide no solidarity and the authorities refuse to help, she takes matters into her own hands with increasingly reckless acts of retribution. “You don't want it to be a film where she's completely hammered to the ground,” says Marshal. “I love the fact that she, out of sheer desperation, steps up her game.”

Marshal was also convinced to take on the project when she saw Hart’s crackerjack short Candy Floss from 2016 starring the then little-known Barry Keoghan. “I thought, Jed knows that crucial thing: he knows where to put the camera, which quite a lot of directors don't. That was exciting.”

Hart’s visual flair is evident in Restless, too. The film opens with a sly nod to Goodfellas – the red light from a car boot illuminating Nicky’s face – and baroque music swelling on the soundtrack. You might think you're watching a stylish American crime film, only for the screen to flash back to a week earlier to the facade of a grey, pebble-dashed semi-detached where much of the action will take place. Hart mines much tension and plenty of laughs by walking this tightrope between slick Hollywood film grammar and kitchen sink realism.

“I'm just trying to mix the style of the things that I love,” says Hart of this juxtaposition. “I love classic British filmmaking. I'm obsessed with Shane Meadows, with Mike Leigh, Ken Loach. I wanted to take that as a kind of bedrock, and then build into something that feels a lot more melodramatic and lean into genre, kind of bringing those other influences [he cites the Coen Brothers and Polanski during our chat] into the pot.”

It was a tough shoot, shot fast over two weeks in a real semi-detached ex-council house. The film was particularly taxing on Marshal. It’s a highly subjective film, told through the eyes of Nicky as she’s slowly sent over the edge. “I found it challenging because I felt quite lonely filming it,” says Marshal. “You know, everyone on the crew was really nice, Jed’s amazing, but even though I was surrounded by everyone in the house, the part is [Nicky] on her own for quite a lot of it throughout the night, and I felt that. But she was also a dream of a part.”

While this subjective style was hard on Marshal, Hart seems to have been in his element. “I do love that mode of filmmaking where you're completely with one character,” he says. “We know very little to nothing about the neighbour or his backstory; we're completely in Nicky’s point of view. So as the film progresses, I loved leaning into those psychological elements. We had so much fun with the sound design, and really trying to reflect her inner psyche through what we're seeing and hearing. It's what cinema is all about.”

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Restless is released 4 Apr by Metis Films