How does the man behind Russia’s most soothing cartoon dog end up with an 18+ horror hit? Leonid Shmelkov’s ‘Restlessness’ strands two travelers in a roadside hotel they can’t escape.

Nepokoy (“Restlessness”), a feature-length art-house animation for adults, is now playing in Russian theaters. That in itself is news: 18+ animation is a real rarity not only in Russia but worldwide. Nepokoy has already become a phenomenon: it’s the highest-grossing Russian animated film for adults, the living legend Yuri Norstein has praised it, and its heroine has been turned into a Dymkovo toy, a traditional Russian painted-clay folk figurine. Nepokoy’s director, Leonid Shmelkov, is known online for his viral animated clips about a dog named Andrei and the dog’s friends. The feature looks nothing like them: it’s a surreal story about travelers stranded in a mysterious hotel run by the eccentric Madam. The critic Anton Khitrov explains how to read this puzzle of a film — and why it became a hit.

Warning: This review contains spoilers. If you want to avoid them, read up to the next yellow banner, then come back once you’ve seen the film.

Had A24 released Nepokoy, movie buffs worldwide would already be snapping up the studio’s merchandise — tiger-print infinity scarves, pink bunny keychains. Slow-paced, unsettling, and not fully comprehensible on first viewing, the film is bound — despite all those qualities — to build a fan base. A Russian one, though, not yet an international one.

Leonid Shmelkov — who won Russia’s Nika Award and Berlin’s Crystal Bear for his short film Moy lichny los (“My Personal Moose”) — spent three and a half years making Nepokoy and showed it at several festivals in 2025, including the Moscow International Film Festival and the Big Cartoon Festival. The film has only now reached theaters; online, it will be available on Okko.

For all its originality, Nepokoy produces a sense of déjà vu at every turn, and each new review of it arrives with its own catalog of spotted references. Shmelkov himself cites Groundhog Day, the films of David Lynch, and Julio Cortázar’s story “House Taken Over” — a classic of magical realism about a brother and sister who live alone in their family’s city mansion but meekly abandon it as unnamed entities take over one room after another. There are far more sources than that, conscious and unconscious alike, from mythology and folklore to 19th- and 20th-century prose and contemporary cinema. Animation is in the mix too: the most obvious analog is Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. But in Shmelkov’s hands, everything is much darker.

The story opens with two travelers — the imperturbable Yasha and the perpetually drowsy Bernard — driving across Russia one hot summer in a car whose pink color is no accident. They turn off the road for the night at a roadside hotel called the Rose, lost among the fields. Its owner, a certain “Madam” — cheerful, talkative, and somehow a little too pushy — takes a distinct interest in Yasha.

By the next day, the travelers realize that they can’t leave the Rose and that something is off about the hotel itself. The longer they stay, the more marvels they find. One guest can teleport. Another turns into a little pyramid. A third is a tiger, though he walks on two legs. Little by little, the Rose’s residents start disappearing, and strange creatures overrun the surrounding fields — all of it set to the unbearably disquieting music of Sergei Kuryokhin, performed by Alexei Aigi’s ensemble 4’33”.

The new film has little in common with Shmelkov’s therapeutic reels about Andrei, though his followers will still find familiar touches — his characteristic gentle voice, for instance, which he lends to several characters, including the leads, Yasha and Madam. Much closer to Nepokoy is another of his works, the 2021 short Komnata s vidom na more (“A Room with a Sea View”), which is also available online. Visually it’s sparer than the feature — black-and-white with occasional flecks of red and green — but the character designs already hint at the future cast of Nepokoy. And the plot is all but identical.

The idea for the short seems to grow entirely out of observations of the frustration that sets in on vacation: you travel for the experience and find only boredom when you arrive. A traveler named Herbert checks into a rented room whose sea view is nominal at best — really just a narrow strip between buildings — and spends his hours moping in front of the television. Before long he meets a mysterious florist from the shop across the street, and she takes over his thoughts completely. Like Madam, she rules an enchanted kingdom of her own — a kingdom of plants — but in looks she is closer to Rita, another of the hotel’s residents: the same silence, the same wide eyes.

Still, Shmelkov has never worked in a visual language as complex and varied as the one in Nepokoy.

Nepokoy gives us a convincing portrait of the Russian backwoods, full of living detail: the road overgrown with gray weeds, the air swarming with flies — leave a car in the yard overnight and by morning you’ll find a couple of apples on the hood. In some scenes, the balance of stylization and realism is no less exact than the celebrated Studio Ghibli’s: a flock of sheep drawn as a single creature, many-headed and flowing, or the painstaking animation of food, from a meager hotel breakfast to a fantastical pomegranate that might have been borrowed from .

The effect is all the more startling when the lifelike image suddenly gives way to a schematic, deliberately primitive one, as in the Andrei cartoons. Or, on the contrary, to detailed, intricate surrealist images, such as the imagined “eternal tiger” coiled into a ring like an ouroboros. Nepokoy has both ordinary-looking people and humanoid pink bunnies — frankly cartoonish creatures, a cross between the putti of Old Master paintings and the from Tove Jansson’s books. They apparently embody Yasha’s unconscious — since they anticipate desires he doesn’t yet know he has.

The bunnies are the only characters the animators didn’t draw from life. For everyone else, they used rotoscoping, a retro technique, an old analog of today’s . It works like this: a live actor plays the character and is filmed; an artist then traces the movements, adjusting the proportions as needed (the textbook example is Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). The characters in Nepokoy have cartoon faces and human everything else, so the facial expressions come out exaggerated while the body language is startlingly natural. The dancing is especially expressive; the choreography in Nepokoy, incidentally, is quite idiosyncratic — like something out of an experimental dance piece.

Spoilers start here!

Nepokoy’s plot and visual style are in fine harmony: the animation here is realism plus stylization, and the script is everyday life plus archetypes. Madam, for instance, is drawn, acted, and voiced in a way that lets you picture her at the register of your nearest supermarket. But is she human? Hardly. More likely she’s good at pretending.

A goddess or sorceress who keeps a mortal man as her lover by force is an ancient image with a rich history. Readers of Homer — and viewers of Christopher Nolan — will inevitably think of the nymph Calypso, who kept Odysseus from going home for seven years. Then there’s the legend of the German knight Tannhäuser, who spent those same seven years in the cave of the goddess Holda — Venus, in Richard Wagner’s opera. The most obvious Russian counterpart is Pavel Bazhov’s “The Stone Flower”: the Mistress of the Copper Mountain may not make Danila the Craftsman her husband, but everything else matches.

In all these stories, the hero is either across the sea or underground — in short, in the land of the dead. And since the world of the dead is an inverted world, it’s no surprise that a woman rules it, with patriarchal logic being what it is. To some extent, all these stories are about male fear of women in general and of women with power in particular. Nepokoy is no exception: in Shmelkov’s film, that fear takes the form of Madam — mocking, loud, demanding, with a short “masculine” haircut.

If the hero in all such stories is symbolically held in the land of the dead, does that make the Rose the afterlife? Not quite: the clue is in the title. The Russian word nepokoy — literally the absence of pokoy, rest — is bound up with unquiet souls, the ones stuck between life and death. That is the oldest horror story there is, familiar to just about every culture. So the Rose appears to mark the border between two worlds, like Baba Yaga’s hut in Russian folktales (another of the film’s many sources). Madam, with her big nose, even looks like her. The Rose’s eccentric guests die off one by one because they are, in fact, already dead: at some point they’re simply let through. And you can pass, it seems, only by understanding something about yourself.

Yasha, at any rate, understands a great deal before he’s allowed to leave the hotel. He meets his own fear, for instance, at the very start of the film, when he spots his pursuers from the car window: mysterious runners. There’s a whole crowd of them, and they’re something like zombies — vicious, frenzied, nearly indistinguishable from one another apart from the numbers on their shirts.

In time it becomes clear that the runners, it seems, are a projection straight out of Yasha’s head: this is how he sees human society. Tellingly, he admits that he loves cars and hates buses — implying, of course, that in a car he picks his own fellow passengers. Only after living at the Rose does Yasha realize that he, too, is one of the runners in some sense.

Seconds before the closing credits, the audience learns for the first time what year — roughly — Yasha and Bernard arrived at the Rose. Shmelkov conceived Nepokoy quite some time ago, in 2019, but he must have settled on the final shot much later — and if he didn’t, one can only marvel at his foresight. A hint will do in a review: if the Rose really is a refuge for unquiet souls, it won’t be short of guests.

Fantastical as it is, Nepokoy conveys the present condition of many of its viewers more precisely than a social media feed does. Shmelkov’s film answers not only Nolan’s The Odyssey but another international box-office hit, Kane Parsons’s Backrooms.

The internet legend behind that film popularized the term “liminal space.” Online, it’s taken to mean an empty, sinister room, preferably windowless. In the humanities, “liminal” simply means transitional, in-between. The Rose fits that definition perfectly. Millions of people are living in liminal space today: between freedom and prison, between normalcy and catastrophe, and, in the end, between their own country and someone else’s.

One more thing. For all the differences between Nepokoy and the Andrei reels, the secret of their relevance is one and the same: Shmelkov is not only a tremendous animator but a brilliant voice actor.

There is no weighty philosophical dialogue in his feature, only ordinary speech — as though you were eavesdropping on a conversation aboard a commuter train. There’s nothing mystical in Madam’s voice, and Yasha talks like a man who’s never surprised by anything, or who is surprised but doesn’t let it show. Sure, a tiger in the hotel, unusual. Sure, the old man turned into a little pyramid, terrific, thanks for showing us, but we really do have to go. The Rose’s other residents are even harder to faze. Yesterday’s paranormal is today’s normal: adaptation is the most natural human quality there is. Nepokoy may be a surrealist film, but in a way it’s realist, with no prefix attached.