Vague Visages’ I Only Rest in the Storm review contains minor spoilers. Pedro Pinho’s 2025 movie features Sérgio Coragem, Cleo Diára and Jonathan Guilherme. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

As an unnamed Kenyan government official once deadpanned, every time they were visited by China, they’d receive funding for a new hospital — and every time Britain visited, they just got a lecture. This dearth of foreign aid for developing nations has naturally led to a rise in NGOs stepping in and picking up contracts to build infrastructure, an altruistic mission on its face that doesn’t need to be scratched far beyond the surface to inspire cynicism. Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho, with his second narrative feature I Only Rest in the Storm, does far more than just nod to the obvious issues that come with letting cash-strapped third parties interfere overseas. The director’s epic tale — in equal parts novelistic and attuned to his previously established verité sensibility as a documentarian — frequently suggests that there’s no bottom when it comes to corruption and neocolonialism.

Premiering in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar despite being more than worthy of a Competition bow, I Only Rest In The Storm is best approached by viewers outside of the arthouse bubble as a discomforting satire masquerading as a hangout movie. Told from the distinctly outsider perspective of unknowable protagonist Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), the film opens with him making the journey from his native Portugal to the Western African nation of Guinea-Bissau by car, with Pinho immediately implying that this will be no straightforward travelogue. Hired as an environmental consultant for a major infrastructure project (building roads connecting the capital city with the most rural communities, many of which will be devastated through the sheer scale), Sérgio aims to ingratiate himself with the locals. However, even those he manages to befriend — such as Diára (Cleo Diára) and Gui (Jonathan Guilherme) — remain vocally wary of him, even if they do spend significant amounts of time together.

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As Sérgio prepares his report, he learns of corruption and cover-ups surrounding his predecessor on the job’s sudden disappearance, and his presumed fantasy of a brief getaway in a hidden hotspot continues to curdle as he can never adjust to the volatile climate. Sérgio may strive to appear more worldly than many of the outwardly racist co-workers within his organization, but he remains the archetypal clueless westerner abroad, struggling to adapt to a culture he’s been appointed the authority of. Pinho never takes a directly polemical approach in I Only Rest in the Storm, refraining from ever villainizing Sérgio so much as making him clueless to the full scale of the cultural dividing lines around him.

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In one of the sharper satirical masterstrokes in a film full of them, Sérgio alienates the locals he befriends even more when he attempts to take a principled stand against the corruption he believes he’s the first to uncover by turning down a significant pay increase to submit his report. Naturally, in a country where people struggle to get by — and, more relevantly, to tell this to a friend facing the forced closure of her bar by a landlord hiking up rent — this couldn’t be more tone deaf if he tried, regardless of his positive intentions. Pinho largely resists attempts to make his lead a reductive White Knight in his characterization, even if Sérgio’s sheer thoughtlessness towards everybody in his orbit can often make him appear as a dry takedown of one.

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The epic scale of I Only Rest in the Storm, clocking in at a whisker over 210 minutes, might make Pinho’s decision to keep viewers at a remove from his protagonist’s headspace (while very rarely straying from his perspective) a frustrating one. For me, this is crucial to the state of sustained discomfort he successfully manages to keep the audience suspended in throughout, forcing viewers to confront the second-hand awkwardness Sérgio’s behavior prompts in almost every situation without easily rationalizing it. Despite mostly ignoring Diára and Gui’s perspective of the protagonist, their view of him — pondering over whether he’s to be trusted considering his background, even if they’re open to spending time together — feels analogous to that of the audience, although Pinho never reduces either to being anything as cosy as audience surrogates. Presumably self-aware that his film will mostly be seen in festivals throughout the global north, the director maintains a thorniness in Diára and Gui’s demeanors that ensures both characters remain detached from what will be the default audience worldview.

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Nowhere is this more uncomfortable than via the way the bisexual fuckboy lead aims to romantically pursue both Diára and Gui, with the voyeuristic nature of the drama feeling weaponized to align the audience with a white protagonist who remains an outsider no matter how present he feels. The argument that a sex scene adds nothing to a narrative is already worth ridiculing, but a seemingly unsimulated bisexual threesome in I Only Rest in the Storm’s third act functions as a borderline meta excoriation of any viewer wanting a window into a world less fortunate than their own. What should appear titillating on its face is denied any erotic charge by deliberately placing Sérgio at a distance, as if the other characters use their sexuality as a means of getting him to confront the way he subconsciously treats them as fetish objects, no matter how much he aims to present himself otherwise. 

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I Only Rest in the Storm’s actors play characters named after themselves, further blurring the line between fiction and documentary, but I think this is deliberately misleading, inviting viewers to read the film as a meta-fictional tale allegorizing the dynamics in the film shoot itself. I don’t think Pinho wants to take down anything that the audience themselves have that much distance from, and his refusal to offer solutions to any of the morally complex ideas will only add to the lingering discomfort. I Only Rest in the Storm is a succinctly angry film in large part because Pinho knows it doesn’t offer a reassuring explanation about its myriad themes.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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