Restless (2012)

The 70s. Ruth Gilmartin (Michelle Dockery) is worried about her mother Sally (Charlotte Rampling). Sally seems to develop something of a paranoid strain, talking about people watching her from the woods surrounding her country home. She’s giving Sally an autobiographical manuscript to read, promising it will explain everything. From it, Sally learns that her mother is actually an exile Russian named Eva Delectorskaya (in the flashbacks that make up two thirds of the two-part movie played by Hayley Atwell).

After the murder of her brother by French fascists in the 30s, Eva learns that her brother was working as a British spy for one Lucas Romer (Rufus Sewell). Romer hires on Eva, too. He’s responsible for a subset of British intelligence trying to bring the USA into the fold of the war against Germany, by means more foul than fair.

Eva turns out to be a rather exceptional spy, but there’s a reason why decades later, she’s not living under her own name and always watching her back. She will need the help of her daughter to finish something that started more than thirty years earlier.

This BBC two-parter directed by Edward Hall based on a novel by William Boyd (who also scripted the films) is not completely successful. I’ve heard the novel is quite a bit better than the movie, but I can’t vouch for it, because I have still not read every interesting book ever written, unfortunately. The film’s strengths are obvious: the cast is top-notch, the BBC has a knack for historical productions that seem authentic on a TV budget (even a comparatively high one), and the plot is certainly not lacking in the good stuff of spy business, paranoia and romance. Alas, even some of these strengths don’t quite work as well for the film as they could. While Atwell and Rampling are great as always, it’s also difficult to take the idea seriously that Atwell will age into Rampling. Indeed, I have difficulty imagining two actresses who look less alike. This may sound like a minor problem, but I found the regular shifts between the two actresses rather jolting and not really helpful for immersion.

That isn’t exactly something that is helped by the 70s part of the film. Where the 30s do look authentic enough in a “look, it’s a classy TV reproduction of the time” manner, there’s little of believable temporal flavour visible in that part of the movie. Again, this isn’t a terrible problem but does make the movie’s ability to convince of its world somewhat shaky. There’s also the fact that Hall’s direction is often a bit bland, demonstrating an approach to direction that seems rather too fond of coasting on the achievements of actors and production designers but not always doing enough to with them. There are, however, a handful of very capably realized suspense sequences – particularly in the second part – that are alone good enough to make the films worthwhile as spy movies.

The script isn’t without its troubles too. The 70s parts of the film are – in general – just not terribly interesting, taking up too much of the film’s running time and slowing it down for what often feels like no good reason at all. I’m also not terribly happy with the way the flashbacks and the way their information influences Ruth are handled, seeing as it heavily suggest she’s the slowest reader ever, even when confronted with the sort of manuscript any sane person would dive into in one sitting.


However, the elements of the two-parter that do work, do work rather well. There are the the already mentioned suspense sequences, our lead actresses (as well as Sewell and the usual British bunch of absurdly talented minor actors), as well as a handful of moments of delightful paranoia and distrust. Restless’s problem to my eyes isn’t so much that it isn’t good, but that its flaws seem so obvious and so eminently fixable (and are supposedly much better handled in the novel), one can’t help but ask oneself why they weren’t fixed.