Watching this remarkable small-budget debut feature, you are never quite certain that its directors, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, knew what they were doing.
Helen (Annie Townsend) is an 18-year-old from a care home who is asked to play the part of a murdered girl in a police reconstruction and insinuates herself into the dead girl’s life.
Her story is told through a screenplay that is often simplistic in the extreme and acting that is only just adequate — though Townsend, who played for Newcastle United women’s team before turning to acting, is a saving grace as the troubled and lonely protagonist.
In the end, however, the whole works surprisingly well. Its final scene, where a social worker tells Helen for the first time about her parents and shows her a photograph of herself with them as a small child, is undeniably moving, and in the most truthful way.
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.
Helen
Cert: PG
