Jed Hart’s “Restless” has a deadly simple premise that, in the tradition of any thriller that’s worth a damn, illustrates the fragility of our social contract. Nicky (Lyndsey Marshall) is an empty nester — her son has moved out, her parents, who were her neighbors, have died — who is living in a state of pseudo-reassuring aloneness. When she’s not being overworked into oblivion as a nurse at a rest home, there’s time with the cat, televised billiards, classical music, and home-baked sweets. Maybe not the dream, but not bad — it could certainly get worse, and of course it does.
Hart and the unflinchingly believable Marshall do not overplay the poignancy of these scenes. They do not condescend to Nicky for being a single woman of a “certain age,” and they aren’t looking for the audience’s pity. We get to see the pleasures of Nicky’s routine. Nicky watching billiards seems like a particularly telling detail for reasons that I can’t quite pinpoint. We don’t see women watching stuff like that in movies very often. It’s a suggestively specific bit of texture.
New neighbors move in, and that deadly simple premise kicks in.
The neighbor, Deano (Aston McAuley), is a burly, muscled, tatted bro who is about half Nicky’s age and twice her size. He’s got “volcanic criminal” written all over him in all caps, and your back tenses up the minute that Nicky and Deano share the screen. He parties all night, blasting his music against the thin walls while getting loaded with his buddies and having loud sex with teenage girls. Nicky’s entreaties to Deano for him to quiet down are met with hostility, and things escalate.
Nicky’s routine — a life that is already a concession to disappointment — is ruined overnight by a dick with loud music. That’s all it took. That’s how easy it is for someone to take your peace of mind. I am reminded of a George Carlin bit in which he said that losing electricity would be enough to reduce our society to barbarism. That bit is decades old and it seems scarier now than it was then. I’m also reminded of last week’s “Sharp Corner,” in which a man is pushed into an existential reckoning by the bend of a road. Social thrillers are best at underscoring the flimsiness of our cocoons.
Hart shrewdly blends a British kitchen sink movie in the vein of, say Ken Loach, with a rough, equally class-conscious Brit thriller along the lines of a “Straw Dogs” or an “Eden Lake.” Loach has faith in people. His recent and quite wonderful “The Old Oak” is about the possibility for the proletariat to bond in the aim towards initiating reform. “Restless” belongs to a much more cynical tradition. The people here are beat-up and constantly enraged by their lack of money or possibilities, to the point that Nicky, who is barely getting by herself, can be resented for her comparatively posh existence.
The thriller elements seep into the picture at a slow drip, as Hart prioritizes character portraiture over set pieces. Deano is obviously the villain, and he’s no less believably rendered than Nicky, though his motivations are vague. If his own troubles had been underscored a bit, he might have been more haunting. But that’s nitpicking.
It’s not nitpicking, however, to say that the film’s ending is a major disappointment. It’s glib and snarky and completely unworthy of the movie that preceded it.
The core source of discomfort here remains undiminished though: A woman is conditioned over the course of a week into being ready to commit murder, and you as an audience member are probably craving it as a release of tension and perhaps as a reprieve from your own real-life frustrations. Hart allows you to believe in the social degradation as it unfolds second by second. That’s what noise can do.
The documentary “Kim’s Video,” shot, edited, and directed by the husband-and-wife team of David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, is about as sloppy as a likable movie can be. To be fair, the filmmakers are balling on a budget and managing things by the seat of their pants. That said, if they can’t find shape in their editing room, that’s on them. Yet above it all there’s a shaggy vitality here that can’t be written off. Watching this movie, you may continue to seesaw between appreciating the enthusiasm and energy and ruing the missed possibilities. For one thing, the documentarian-essayist Mark Cousins probably could’ve wringed a mad classic out of this material.
Kim’s Video is a series of video stores that existed in New York City from the early 1980s through the early aughts, becoming legendary in cinephile hipster circles before inevitably succumbing to the erosion of interest in physical media. They were run by Yong-man Kim, a tall and elegant Korean immigrant who fraternizes with people like Quentin Tarantino and has the mysterious air of a gangster. His stores were famous for the sheer wealth and breadth of films that they carried, and for the democracy of how films commingled on the shelves. An undistributed Godard film, in this store illegally, might not be too far down the aisle from a stop-motion Sinbad movie or pornography. Customers like the Coen Brothers racked up monster late fees.
Redmon mans the camera and serves as our host, offering us a primer on Kim’s Video that one assumes will lead to another doc that celebrates our vanishing analog world. That’s been done before, many times, but it might’ve been preferable to the route that Redmon takes instead. Once Kim’s Video closed, its thousands of videos were shipped to a village in Italy, which promised they would be lovingly preserved and exhibited. Instead, the videos were stuffed into a few rooms and forgotten. Redmon is treated by the village’s political body as a nuisance, and eventually he gets Kim involved in his effort to the get these movies returned to the United States.
The mixture of political conspiracy and cinephilia is potentially irresistible, though Redmon doesn’t render it with much coherence. From what we see, this village probably used these videos as a way to nab cultural funding that was then siphoned off into other places. Maybe it was embezzled, maybe it was lost through the cracks of bureaucratic incompetence, most likely it was a little of both.
Redmon wants us to consider mobsters and election conspiracies, but he doesn’t have the organization, discipline, or formal skill to bring that idea off. Too much pivots on Redmon hectoring people in badly shot interview segments that are spliced together seemingly at random. Watching “Kim’s Video,” one comes to appreciate the technical competency of those interchangeably stylish crime docs that pop up on every conceivable streamer on a daily basis.
This doc is brought to life by Kim, who Redmon eventually interviews. Kim seems to be a polite and poignant fellow with the sheathed teeth that one would expect of someone who ran several successful businesses in New York City for years before gentrification. There’s a terrific moment in which Kim says something soundbite-friendly for the conclusion of an interview, only to have Redmon keep the camera on. When Kim asks if they are done, he shows a hint of his steeliness.
“Kim’s Video” also benefits from the inherent poignancy of those DVDs and VHS tapes. These are totemic objects, many of which contain wild filmic obscurities that are now unimaginable in a pop cultural realm that’s as gentrified as many of our cities. Redmon and Sabin eventually manage to spring several unforgettable images: of people wearing homemade masks of cinematic heroes while assembling for the preservation of what is nothing less than a lost way of life. In its rough and tumble way, “Kim’s Video” illustrates how lost shops and lost objects add up to lost community.
“Restless” is available on VOD. “Kim’s Video” can be watched on Tubi.
