Critics reviews

Remarkably, [the film] comes across nowhere near as didactic as it might sound, but rather invigorating, as much in its revolutionary spirit as its unique setting in the Swiss Jura Mountains... “Unrest” is somehow a film entirely about people and yet doesn’t appear to be about them at all

[Unrest is] less interested in political grandstanding than in depicting how politics are lived on a quotidian basis — and how, in today’s parlance, the microaggressions one suffers on the job can gradually snowball into revolt... The film is a work of carefully realized group portraiture, freezing one moment in time amid the winds of change.

Unrest’s dialogue is geared more to depicting the material workings of the town than toward developing any human-scale drama. The film’s mesmeric visuals and scene-to-scene rhythms likewise resist our inclination to emotionally identify with its human figures.

[In Those Who Are Fine, Cyril Schäublin] depicted the Swiss as a people so narcotized by civility and politeness that they unwittingly go through each day contributing to their own exploitation. With Unrest, Schäublin brings that idea to the level of critical analysis, articulating a precise point in Swiss history when all radical possibility became actively, even gently foreclosed.

Despite [its] documentarian appearance, “Unrest” is simultaneously conscious of its inherent bias as a historical drama film. When Schäublin applies his open-ended aesthetic to this problem, he threads the needle on providing a more comprehensive picture of the time period than you might find in a history book without moralizing about his ideas.

[The film's] concepts only reveal themselves gradually—almost nothing in Unrest is spoken in a loud voice, let alone preached. Schäublin instead allows these ideas to germinate in the mind... After a hushed and loquacious 90 minutes, Unrest leaves the mind purring... If a quieter work of agitprop exists, you might struggle to hear it.

This is anarchism in name, if perhaps not in spirit... By taking in such a small sliver of time – a few months in the early 1870s – Schäublin can’t show any attempted political upheaval, or associated human cost, that would make this political schism register in anything more than an abstract sense.

Schäublin’s approach is one of stripped-back precision. There’s no extraneous score, just one instance of diegetic music... An investment on the part of the audience is required, to focus in on the characters and to follow the dialogue. It’s not quite as dry as it sounds. There is a subtle humour in this singular approach, but like the dialogue and the drama (such that it is), it is sidelined.

Meticulously crafted and very ordered and precise, like the watchmaking it shows in great detail, Unrest is paradoxically both a film about anarchists and an anarchist film itself... [Schäublin’s] very distinctive style works like, well, clockwork to create a peculiar look at human interaction and societal organization.

Utterly singular, Unrest [is] a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.” [It] was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin.

Unrest brandishes its historical-materialist bona fides through this de-emphasis of psychology in favor of social dialectics. As a study of a world on the precipice of discovering the immense power of standardized time, it’s a fascinating and, at times, almost hypnotic look at the skilled but exploited hands that enabled the world to tick to the same beat.

A gorgeously playful oddity... Just as anarchists are proudly anti-authoritarian, so does “Unrest” rebel beautifully against the tyranny of things having to happen in a movie... [It's a film that's] expertly balanced, as though by precision pincers under a magnifier, between the heavy ideas on its mind and the mischievous lightness in its heart.