Reviews
Channel 4 Film
Jon Fortgang
"With its unusual blending of the formal and the mysterious, the intimate and the impressionistic, Helen is a film of quiet but deadly power. The final line - though impossible to recognise as such when it's delivered - hangs heavily in the air for an age, raising questions no one here can answer. It's a perfectly-judged exit for this haunting exercise in hushed intensity."
17/06/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
"Helen is at once enigmatic and lucid, even transparent: there's a sense of mystery without mystification. At one point Helen, playing detective, hands Danny a photograph: "Can I ask you to describe what you see in this picture?" This fascinating film asks us pretty much the same question. And I suspect that every viewer will have a different answer."
03/05/2009
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The Observer
Philip French
"Some will find the performances stilted and artificial, and I can sympathise with them, but it is consistent. Helen is a film that invites contemplation, concentration and involvement, and at my second viewing last week I found it as absorbing as when I saw it with a rapt French audience last October."
03/05/2009
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"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."
03/05/2009
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Variety
Leslie Felperin
"With its slow pace, deliberately stiff perfs and oblique storytelling, pic feels less like a typically realist British movie and more like a European art film. "
27/06/2008
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The Times
Wendy Ide
"Slow burning and enigmatic, the film is occasionally a little too mannered, but it introduces a pair of writer/directors of real talent in Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor."
30/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
"There’s something naggingly film-studies about the idea that posing as the privileged, snuffed-out Joy prompts Helen to re-examine her own identity, and the actors are encouraged to speak their lines in a level, authoritarian tone which overeggs our awareness of Enigmatic Parable . But Molloy and Lawlor’s film, arrestingly well-composed and sound-designed, has a woozy suggestiveness that’s nothing if not promising."
01/05/2009
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The Mirror
Mark Adams
"Low budget Brit drama is intriguing but slow."
26/04/2009
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The Financial Times
Martin Hoyle
"Just as the story grips you it ends, leaving you mystified beyond the call of the enigmatic plot."
29/04/2009
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"It could have been a conventional cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller. But Molloy and Lawlor aspire to something more complex and less schematic: a meditation on identity and fate, filmed and presented in a way utterly different from a crime procedural. It drifts. It floats. It is dreamy, mysterious and often beautiful. The camerawork is fluent and fluid..."
01/05/2009
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
"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."
01/05/2009
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Empire Magazine
Anna Smith
"This Brit drama scored at festivals with its haunting score and crisp visuals. Less welcome is the am-dram support. Beyond Townsend, all the talent is behind the lens, although the script from writer-directors Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy doesn’t deliver what it promises either."
17/06/2009
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Total Film
Philip Kemp
"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."
14/04/2009
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The Independent
John Walsh
"It's a neat idea, of one life "standing-in" for another and starting afresh, but badly handled. It's a glum 79 minutes."
01/05/2009
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