Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Help’ on Acorn TV, a Gripping COVID Drama Starring Jodie Comer as a Frontline Health Care Worker

Help is an Acorn TV exclusive movie about a health care assistant in a nursing home in March, 2020, a month and year that you-know-what happened. But don’t sigh in the face of “yet another COVID movie” – it’s a purposeful drama that likely deserves more eyes on it than it’s likely to get. That’s mostly due to Jodie Comer, the rising star of Killing Eve and Free Guy fame, and stalwart character actor Stephen Graham, who give the type of performances you don’t shake off easily.

HELP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s late 2019. Sarah (Comer) does a last-minute, slightly nervous touch-up on her makeup before an interview for a job at a nursing home. She has a slight smudge of mascara on her brow but she doesn’t notice. Inside, she’s greeted by Tony (Graham), one of the residents, the odd middle-aged man living among those more advanced of age. Sarah has a contentious exchange with the home manager, Steve (Ian Hart), who was just challenging her, and she stood up for herself, so she’s hired. Mascara smudge? Not important. She was the only candidate for the position, and Steve just needs some help, implication being, this is probably a thankless job. But Sarah cared for her Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother, and learned to love the work.

On her first day, Sarah’s barely pulled on the pale yellow polo that serves as a uniform when she faces her first challenge. Tony’s missing. Steve calls the police and he and Sarah hop in his car. Tony does this regularly. He wanders off. He has early-onset dementia and often tries to walk home to see his mother. He could get confused and lost. A sigh of relief as they find him on the street, and where Steve is firm and logical, Sarah has a different approach, warmer, more playfully persuasive. Tony responds better to that. Then he suddenly comes to his senses. “I forgot me mum is dead,” he says, his voice cracking, and you can’t help but imagine how difficult it must be to re-live such a realization over and over and over again.

Sarah’s home life isn’t great – brash younger brother, casually cruel father, a mother who appears more than a little bone-weary – so she works Christmas, when one resident recites a lovely poem for all the assembled residents and Tony counterbalances it with a crass limerick. Sarah’s good at her job. She compassionately helps people through their struggles, often as basic as eating or taking medication, and we don’t see the cleaning up after moments of incontinence, but Steve jokes about it. She sits down so Tony can begin teaching her a card game then get distracted with other talk, an anecdote, then reciprocation, then a reiteration of the card game rules he doesn’t know he already explained, and she’s not just patient, but willing to roll with it. And then one day on the way to work, Sarah listens to a radio report on the first coronavirus deaths in the U.K. Steve enacts safety protocols the best he can amidst foggy information from official channels. There aren’t enough masks and gloves. Elderly patients are moved from overflowing hospitals into the home. And then there aren’t enough healthy workers, leaving Sarah on an overnight shift, alone.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Help is among the best movies about COVID yet – it’s the dramatization of similar events we see in documentaries Convergence: Courage in a Crisis and The First Wave.

Performance Worth Watching: Certainly, Comer gives a bravura performance during that grueling overnight shift, a sequence that sticks with us long after the movie ends. But she shows remarkable depth when interacting with Graham; the two actors share remarkable chemistry, portraying a friendship that’s a warm, moving portrait of mutual affection that’s daring enough to be purely platonic.

Memorable Dialogue: A crushing line from Sarah’s night of hell: “I’m sorry, Kenny. No one’s coming.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: One other movie Help brings to mind: John Carpenter’s original Halloween. Stay with me here. The film’s centerpiece is a 26-minute single-shot sequence (to be nitpicky, it appears to be a few shots cleverly edited together) that fills the film’s entire second act, in which Sarah does what she can for a resident whose every breath resembles a death rattle, a sequence whose closest reference point is Michael Myers’ hauntingly persistent inhalation-exhalation. She calls for help, fruitlessly, walks through corridors, automated lights fluttering awake behind her, unable to keep up with her panicked steps. She pulls on gloves, tries to comforts a suffering old man, discards the gloves, gets a shot of hand sanitizer, goes to the telephone, hangs up, tries to pull herself together, all while a we-are-experiencing-large-call-volume message on the National Health Services emergency line maddeningly repeats over and over and over again from her pocketed cell phone.

So of course, that intensely drawn-out moment brings the plight of the protagonist – and surely many real-life caretakers who experienced similar things – into crystal-clear dramatic focus. But to use a cliche, it’s the small moments that truly define the film. Its empathetic humanity exists in the interactions between Sarah and Tony, which are rich with the messy complications of character; take the scene in which they share and contrast stories of adolescent delinquency with an easy playfulness that’s sweet and affectionate without crossing the boundaries of a patient-caretaker relationship. But don’t be mistaken, the film isn’t feel-good schmaltz. Scripter Jack Thorne and director Marc Munden aren’t afraid to frame Help as a truthful dramatization of past, current and future tragedy. The pandemic is an ongoing catastrophe, and the film’s resolute final moments reflect precisely that.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Help isn’t an easy watch. But the performances, writing, direction, tone and themes are uniformly strong, and it keenly balances heart with harsh reality.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.