I Only Rest in the Storm (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for each setback or annoyance
Take a Drink: for each helping hand
Take a Drink: whenever the heat is mentioned or indicated
Take a Drink: for each impassioned argument
Do a Shot: whenever White People do something rather White
Do a Shot: for each sex scene
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Cannes is no stranger to epic runtimes, but even considering I was mildly surprised to see the 211 minute citation for this one. Some such stories earn their every minute, though.
I Only Rest in the Storm covers the breadth of a man’s journey to the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, a former colony of his Portuguese homeland. He’s there to write an environmental impact assessment on a proposed road construction project, but while there he discovers much, much more.
A Toast
The film opens with a light sense of absurdity and exotic mystery, as North African music envelopes you in this man’s sense of adventure even as he runs into one obstacle or issue after another. This will be a theme of the film, which I felt accurately captured some of the chaos in navigating and living in a developing country (the kind of place where the idea for our site began).
As Sergio begins his task and starts to meet some of the people surrounding the social circles he starts to walk in, a complex conversation begins between the many kinds of people he encounters, and the filmmaker and audience. It feels as if director Pedro Pinho, who lived in Mozambique among many other places, is trying to at least ask if not answer as many complex questions about race and colonization, capital, and power, identity and morality, and so, so much more as he can in regards to his Guinea-Bissau setting and the people that inhabit it.
The time flies because there is so much to discover, and a palpable sense of danger arises as Sergio becomes more enveloped in the dealings and desires of the people who call this place home now, despite the many places the hie from. While fiction, it’s semi-ethnographic, documental even. Seldom have I known so little about a place before watching a film, and felt like I knew so much about it after.
Beer Two
Sergio is a bit of maddening a psychosexual cipher, quite likely even to himself. I can appreciate that, although the easy NC-17 nature of the sex scenes feels like one more provocation than necessary.
Verdict
I Only Rest in the Storm is a heady portrait of a nation in flux, dizzying in both its diversity and traditions and the inequalities that also define it.
