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Helen Reviews
The film is almost a progression of Helen gaining agency at the expense of the cipher, Joy.
| Original Score: 4/5 | May 1, 2020
Earnest in intent but shaky in delivery, Helen is a film whose execution just can't live up to the strong ideas behind it.
| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 31, 2019
| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 29, 2010
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.
| Original Score: 4/5 | May 7, 2009
Helen is an ambitious film, at once gripping and meditative, that touches with intelligence.
| May 7, 2009
Much like an ambitious video-art installation, it's intriguing, inconclusive and not as challenging as it wants to be.
| Original Score: 2/5 | May 1, 2009
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.
| Original Score: 3/6 | May 1, 2009
With its unusual blending of the formal and the mysterious, the intimate and the impressionistic, Helen is a film of quiet but deadly power.
| Original Score: 4/5 | May 1, 2009
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.
| Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2009
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.
| Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2009
Molloy and Lawlor's film, arrestingly well-composed and sound-designed, has a woozy suggestiveness that's nothing if not promising.
| Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2009
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.
| Original Score: 2/5 | May 1, 2009
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.
| Original Score: 2/5 | May 1, 2009
Low budget Brit drama is intriguing but slow.
| May 1, 2009
Just as the story grips you it ends, leaving you mystified beyond the call of the enigmatic plot.
| Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2009
It's a neat idea, of one life "standing-in" for another and starting afresh, but badly handled. It's a glum 79 minutes.
| Original Score: 1/5 | May 1, 2009
It's pleasingly impossible to describe the ominously beautiful atmosphere that haunts this bold and baffling Brit debut.
| Original Score: 4/5 | May 1, 2009
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.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2009
Ultimately, Helen doesn't quite work, but it remains an oddly haunting experience that's definitely worth seeing. Terrific final line, too.
| Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2009