Helen (2008)

Critic Reviews

• Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

  Its beauty and sadness are simply overwhelming. Anglo-Irish cinema gets a new, fully-formed identity.

• Cosmo Landesman, Sunday Times (UK)

  Given its harrowing theme, Helen is a beautiful and restrained work. The camera quietly and slowly glides along Helen's world, laying bare the loneliness of a marginalised girl who is longing to find a life of her own.

• Philip French, Observer [UK]

  Helen is an ambitious film, at once gripping and meditative, that touches with intelligence.

• Anna Smith, Empire Magazine

  Much like an ambitious video-art installation, it's intriguing, inconclusive and not as challenging as it wants to be.

• Dave Calhoun, Time Out

  You couldn't call this audacious British debut a success; it's too arch, awkward and over-extended for that. But, oddly, it's those very same qualities which make it arresting to watch and which mark out its two directors as talents to keep an eye on.

• Jon Fortgang, Film4

  With its unusual blending of the formal and the mysterious, the intimate and the impressionistic, Helen is a film of quiet but deadly power.

• Wendy Ide, Times [UK]

  A moody British/Irish co-production, Helen is beautifully photographed and blessed with a wistfully atmospheric score, but it's a little bit creaky in some of the performances.

• Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

  The final sequence, in which the directors boldly refuse any neat tying-up of their story, is bracingly intelligent. Lawlor and Molloy are real talents with a distinctive, if evolving, film-making language of their own.

• Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph

  Molloy and Lawlor's film, arrestingly well-composed and sound-designed, has a woozy suggestiveness that's nothing if not promising.

• Tim Evans, Sky Movies

  Mannered and over-contrived, it's a waste of a good idea despite the best efforts of Birkeland, whose elegant framing and rich composition allow the viewer to overlook the sheer joylessness of the piece.

• Philip Kemp, Total Film

  It's an intriguing premise - but this debut feature from short filmmakers Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor never gets up to speed. It feels like a first draft, with some painfully stilted dialogue.

• Mark Adams, Sunday Mirror [UK]

  Low budget Brit drama is intriguing but slow.

• Martin Hoyle, Financial Times

  Just as the story grips you it ends, leaving you mystified beyond the call of the enigmatic plot.

• John Walsh, Independent

  It's a neat idea, of one life "standing-in" for another and starting afresh, but badly handled. It's a glum 79 minutes.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  It is a plain and simple story which is told so directly and with such a lack of obvious sophistication that it finally triumphs beyond all expectation.

• Matthew Turner, ViewLondon

  Ultimately, Helen doesn't quite work, but it remains an oddly haunting experience that's definitely worth seeing. Terrific final line, too.

Read all 16 critic reviews