I'm truly shocked at just how emotional and frightening this film was.
To try and break down the emotions felt would take a while because for me personally it was a total overload of sadness, empathy, anxiety, and plenty more emotions that I've not felt watching a film for a long time.
'Help' starts with an excellent introduction to care home life and how truly resilient these carers have to be just to do their daily job, all while working for minimum wage. We see Stephen Grahams excellent acting shine and he honestly puts on one of his performances of his acting career here by playing Tony, an early onset dementia patient who is quick to anger due to his confusion but who is also a good, kind hearted man. Jodie Cormers character Sarah struggles to adjust to being a permanent care home worker and is overwhelmed with the pressure and stress that looking after very unwell patients can cause. This is on top of her dysfunctional home life which is put on full display here, especially her verbally abusive father who criticises her at every opportunity. There's a gritty realness to all of this that I enjoyed, it didn't feel acted it felt like this was their real lives.
When we approach the second third of Help the film switches gears and becomes honestly quite horrifying to watch, in fact if you played just this middle part alone and asked someone to tell you what genre of film it was almost everybody would say horror, but this is almost unbelievably based on real life. Sarah is left all alone to work throughout the night in a covid ridden care home while patients are dying around her and when one becomes clearly unwell she has to battle to try and help him all while getting no help from anyone, not even emergency services, this is scary to watch. To be all alone with no one to turn to in times of need is something everyone in this life dreads and it's portrayed in full effect here. The desperation that Sarah feels comes across so excellently that you start to feel the anxiety, frustration and panic that she had when nobody was coming to help the incredibly sick patients. She was forced to watch as everybody around her died slowly and painfully to Covid and I think we got to see how traumatising this is for care home workers, it really opens your eyes to what was going on around all of us not too long ago. Its shocking.
As we break through into the final chapter of the film we see Sarah kidnap Tony out of the care home where so much death and despair is occurring. These scenes are hard to watch because you know she is doing this for all the right reasons but you just know it isn't going to end well. The heart of the film shows when they both play cards at the caravan park where they've been hiding out and they speak on how they really care for each other. This is brutally snatched away from both of them when the police arrive and arrest Sarah. Tony is returned to the hell of a care home against his will to possibly die and Sarah is looking at prison time all because she took a stand when the government crumbled and failed her at every point. I think this film makes many things clear and exposes the utter catastrophe that happens when the people who run a country fail to help the people they govern. It also shows the horrifyingly destructive nature of the Corona virus and how it caused such pain and misery to everybody it grips ahold of. Clearly this is not a happy go lucky kind of film but if you want to watch a honest, gritty, emotion filled and excellently acted film that opens your eyes to the shocking hard reality of COVID-19 then this film is something you need to check out. As someone who's been watching films religiously for 20 years I can honestly say this is one of most hard hitting and impactful films I've ever seen. Shocking and scary at the same time.
To try and break down the emotions felt would take a while because for me personally it was a total overload of sadness, empathy, anxiety, and plenty more emotions that I've not felt watching a film for a long time.
'Help' starts with an excellent introduction to care home life and how truly resilient these carers have to be just to do their daily job, all while working for minimum wage. We see Stephen Grahams excellent acting shine and he honestly puts on one of his performances of his acting career here by playing Tony, an early onset dementia patient who is quick to anger due to his confusion but who is also a good, kind hearted man. Jodie Cormers character Sarah struggles to adjust to being a permanent care home worker and is overwhelmed with the pressure and stress that looking after very unwell patients can cause. This is on top of her dysfunctional home life which is put on full display here, especially her verbally abusive father who criticises her at every opportunity. There's a gritty realness to all of this that I enjoyed, it didn't feel acted it felt like this was their real lives.
When we approach the second third of Help the film switches gears and becomes honestly quite horrifying to watch, in fact if you played just this middle part alone and asked someone to tell you what genre of film it was almost everybody would say horror, but this is almost unbelievably based on real life. Sarah is left all alone to work throughout the night in a covid ridden care home while patients are dying around her and when one becomes clearly unwell she has to battle to try and help him all while getting no help from anyone, not even emergency services, this is scary to watch. To be all alone with no one to turn to in times of need is something everyone in this life dreads and it's portrayed in full effect here. The desperation that Sarah feels comes across so excellently that you start to feel the anxiety, frustration and panic that she had when nobody was coming to help the incredibly sick patients. She was forced to watch as everybody around her died slowly and painfully to Covid and I think we got to see how traumatising this is for care home workers, it really opens your eyes to what was going on around all of us not too long ago. Its shocking.
As we break through into the final chapter of the film we see Sarah kidnap Tony out of the care home where so much death and despair is occurring. These scenes are hard to watch because you know she is doing this for all the right reasons but you just know it isn't going to end well. The heart of the film shows when they both play cards at the caravan park where they've been hiding out and they speak on how they really care for each other. This is brutally snatched away from both of them when the police arrive and arrest Sarah. Tony is returned to the hell of a care home against his will to possibly die and Sarah is looking at prison time all because she took a stand when the government crumbled and failed her at every point. I think this film makes many things clear and exposes the utter catastrophe that happens when the people who run a country fail to help the people they govern. It also shows the horrifyingly destructive nature of the Corona virus and how it caused such pain and misery to everybody it grips ahold of. Clearly this is not a happy go lucky kind of film but if you want to watch a honest, gritty, emotion filled and excellently acted film that opens your eyes to the shocking hard reality of COVID-19 then this film is something you need to check out. As someone who's been watching films religiously for 20 years I can honestly say this is one of most hard hitting and impactful films I've ever seen. Shocking and scary at the same time.