Help
Directed by Marc Munden
Running time: 1hr38 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Stephen Graham and Jodie Comer star in Help
Many will have found themselves in the bizarre situation over the last couple of years of feeling that if the UK government are going to behave in such a nakedly crooked way, then the least they could do would be to be go about said crookedness in a competent sort of fashion. Perhaps if you’re going to hand astronomical amounts of public PPE procurement money over to dodgy people you’re mates with, instead of following legitimate protocols, then at a bare minimum, these back-of-a-lorry deals should be done with cronies who can actually provide PPE equipment, no?
Or maybe you’ve felt that if the government’s handling of the pandemic was going to be so bungled, in such a flagrantly Mr Bean-like fashion, that it wouldn’t be quite such a bitter pill to swallow if you could at least feel that these idiots had their hearts in the right place, that they were at least bunglers trying their dim best. But no. We ended up with a spectacularly whiffy double whammy of corruption and incompetence, an unappealing sort of Berlusconi / Mr Blobby Venn diagram, both evil and farcical, a disgraceful banana-skin republic.
Channel 4’s excellent TV movie Help will stir up all these kinds of feelings and more, but unlike me in the paragraphs above, it does not do so through venting. We know and will remember the statistics: care homes received 10% of the PPE equipment needed, 40% of the thousands of people who died in the early part of the pandemic were in care homes. This pacy, engaging film takes those statistics and turns them into relatable human beings.
Jodie Comer plays a sharp, likeable young care home worker, thrown in the deep end at a typically under-equipped home. Stephen Graham plays a relatively young man living with early onset Alzheimer’s, whose story shows how the government’s murderous indifference affected people beyond the elderly folk who were so shockingly written off as expendable, in all kinds of ways. Ian Hart has perhaps the trickiest and low-key most affecting role as the care home boss, fed misinformation and forced to pretend that the situation is being handled. All the actors are excellent, including the less starry ensemble cast of older care home residents. This is filmmaking for television at its best: a huge subject, made with supreme watchability, for anyone in the UK to watch for free.
HELP (2021) Written by Jack Thorne | Shot by Mark Wolf | Edited by Simon Smith
