Telluride by the Sea: Helen
After one girl goes missing in a provincial English town, the police ask another, the shy, inarticulate Helen (Annie Townsend), to “be” the missing one in a reenactment, resulting in all sorts of unanticipated and disturbing emotional consequences. The writer-director team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor aka “the desperate optimists,” use this Hitchcockian kernel of story as the foundation for their provocative feature film debut. Molloy and Lawlor work exclusively with nonprofessional actors, build their scripts on a solid foundation of realistic social observation, and film in sinuous and elegant long takes that become operatic in their intricacy. Blending the English kitchen-sink realism approach of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh with the brooding aesthetics of Tarkovsky, HELEN makes a startlingly original impact.
(U.K., 2008, 79m)