Helen

Saw this at the 2008 Sydney Film Festival so apologies if I'm short on detail.

This film does look good, with an all-pervasive dreamy quality. That said, the vocabulary of camera movements is eventually too meagre and repetitive. At times it seems that every shot is a slow dolly.

Like Bloomer wrote in hir comment, the acting and dialog is peculiarly stilted. I initially took this for a deliberate ironic or alienating effect and I read the film as a satire of English New-Labour era 'caring'. The scenes with the teacher, policewoman and social worker all stuck with me for this reason.

But by the end I was forced to conclude that the awkwardness was unintentional and I that I have an overactive imagination. As Alan Donald commented, this film's virtues are simply overwhelmed by bad acting and direction.