A delicate, carefully calibrated account of enmeshed lives and secret sorrows, Helen marks an extraordinary feature debut from the writing/directing team Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, EIFF Best British Short Film award-winners in 2004 for Who Killed Brown Owl. The eponymous college girl, played in a performance of unshowy grace by Annie Townsend, volunteers to stand in for a missing peer in a police reconstruction. The disappeared girl is named Joy; despite her misfortune, her name and the details of her life represent all that is missing from Helen’s solitary life. Joy had a boyfriend; played in a band; has a set of loving, normal parents. Helen has grown up in foster care and nears her 18th birthday having never been kissed. Gradually – and the transition is never forced upon us, never aggressively foregrounded or explained – Helen begins to flower by borrowing elements of Joy’s life.

The discretion and elegance of this film is breathtaking: everything is understated, barring an intense, gentle fascination with the characters’ most mysterious and shielded motivations. In one devastating scene, Helen eats dinner with Joy’s parents, who, in their grief, are greedy for anything that might recall their daughter, even the awkward presence in their house of a lookalike stranger from the same age group. The father, in the course of conversation, bursts into tears; shy Helen has no response, and the mother just sits through it, evidently not for the first time. The everyday acceptance and necessary suppression of extreme pain is the engine of this quietly powerful film, and its restraint is echoed by still, elegant cinematography and a precise, steady pace. The combination of raw, untrained performances with stately rhythms and beautiful compositions is odd and addictive; it’s as if Antonioni had located one of his seductive accounts of disappearance and obsession in some glamourless flatland of contemporary Britain. This doesn’t feel like any current British film. It feels original, it feels painfully true – and it feels like the start of something for Molloy and Lawlor.