On DVD: Helen

A teenage girl enlisted to play the part of a schoolmate in a police reconstruction of her vanishing becomes immersed in the role to an unsettling degree. Paul Martin finds himself feeling quietly impressed and strangely troubled.

The jump-off point for Helen is the same as that previously employed in ten thousand and twelve primetime television police procedural unpleasant-fests. The opening scene shows a teenage girl named Joy Thompson, distinctive with her red hair and yellow jacket, bidding farewell to her friends and wandering away through the local park, presumably homeward bound. Only she never arrives home. Her belongings are found strewn about the park woodland, and there is no trace of Joy. Now if this was the opening scene of a TV show, it would doubtless be followed by two hours of hardbitten coppers running round like headless chickens trying to play basketball, grimly intoning lines like “You'd better take a look at this Guv”, intercut with leeringly nasty scenes of a sobbing Joy incarcerated in some serial killer's dungeon. Most mercifully, Helen does not involve any of those depressingly hackneyed telly staples. Rather, it is a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for the missing persons drama, with the manhunt for Joy taking place somewhere else entirely, and the film instead focusing on one of the seemingly marginal figures in the whole affair.

Helen is the debut feature film from the writing-directing-producing-editing-making the tea and buying the sandwiches partnership of Christine Malloy and Joe Lawlor, and having commenced with the above-described sequence, it swiftly shifts its attentions to the title character. Played by Annie Townsend, Helen attends the same college as Joy and is picked out by the police to play her in a reconstruction of her last recorded movements. But, though there exists this physical similarity between them, the differences between the lives of the disappeared Joy and her doppelganger Helen are pronounced. Joy hails from an affluent family, supported by loving parents (Dennis Jobling and Sandie Malia), and has an older boyfriend, estate agent Danny (Danny Groenland). In contrast, Helen lives in residential care, has no contact at all with her parents, and works as a hotel room cleaner when she is not at college. However the engagement with her missing schoolmate exerts a profound lure for Helen, seeming as it does to offer her route from her own isolated existence, with the promise of a new life of affection – even if that affection is garnered via her designation as Joy's lookalike.

All of which is certainly not to suggest that Helen is some identity-appropriation thriller in the mould of Single White Female. No, the terms in which Lawlor and Molloy document the melding of Joy and Helen are, by and large, subtle and sophisticated. Helen's own need for love and the sense of loss haunting the Thompsons draws those two parties together, each fulfilling a clear emotional need for the other. Yet because this bond is facilitated by the continuing absence of Joy – this absence undeniably implying an awful final fate for the teen – it is a relationship which makes for uncomfortable viewing. Equally unsettling is Helen's own identification with Joy and her exploration of the iconography of the latter's disappearance. Outfitted as Joy, in yellow jacket and with hair dyed red, Helen spends her spare time wandering the park, confessing her inner thoughts to the missing girl. And a further layer of nebulously sinister atmosphere is added by the ultra-minimalist performances from the entire cast. For example, the unusual delivery of Sonia Saville's female police constable when she addresses the students at Joy's college transforms a supposedly reassuring message into something really rather creepy.

The movie plays somewhat akin to an episode of Crimewatch as directed by Béla Tarr, being a patchwork of long, taciturn takes and slow, robotic zooms. Helen is a tale riddled with unanswered questions too, with the myriad uncertainties of character and narrative finding a physical elucidation in the woodland where Joy is last seen. Often shot out-of-focus or with the application of warping effects, the woods are painted as a kind of null-space – in which Joy can simply vanish into thin air, and from where her substitute, Helen, can be reborn. This ambiguity never tips over into deliberate obliqueness though, and Lawlor and Molloy are also astute enough not to labour over any elements in their often disquieting, but always gripping, story.

Rating on a scale of 5 times I accidentally looked up the Ashley Judd film of the same name while trying to find out information about this one: 4

Release date: Out now
Directed by: Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy
Screenplay by: Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy
Starring: Annie Townsend, Danny Groenland, Dennis Jobling, Sandie Malia 
Rating: PG
Running time: 79 minutes