This peculiar little subtitled tale presents an early performance by a now increasingly popular Irish actor, Robert Sheehan (born 1988).It takes us on a young life journey to mid teens and the relationship between two brothers. The ending will come as a surprise! The acting throughout is good and Mr. Sheehan gives his usual 'animated' facial reactions to the various situations that develop. Toned down by the drama is his usually more exuberant voice which has the common actors error of sounding like someone reciting memorized lines rather than a 'natural' flow. On the production side the modern tendency to under-light a scene is mostly absent. This little short story film could be expanded to a feature given the amount of drama in it.
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Horst_In_Translation28 February 2019
Warning: Spoilers
"An Créatúr" or "The Helpless Creature" is a Irish movie not in the English language from 2007, so already over a decade old and the most known cast member is probably lead actor Robert Sheehan. The writer and director of this award-winning 23-minute short film is Peter Footh, who is also not entirely unknown and his most successful effort is "The Young Offenders", both the movie and series version. But back to this one here. The title sounds more like a horror film, but no it is not. It is a family drama 100% from beginning to end. We find out how a family has to deal with one member's severe disability and how it poses challenger to each and every one of them. And we also witness how peers at school deal with the disabled man and there in particular the impact it has on his brother. These two have a really special bond you can say without a doubt. This is also how it feels so out of nowhere when the healthy boy kills the disabled one by drowning at the end. But nothing is what it seems and instead we get a somewhat happy ending. Yeah well, to me it felt forced and unrealistic I must say unfortunately. Sure the murder would have been even worse and not logical from all we knew before, but I did not like the actual ending one bit either I must admit. Also how did the mother not intervene when entering the room and pelase don't say that deep down inside she would have been happy to be freed from the struggles and fighting. Everyhing before that is okay, but not too good either. It is never the quality character study I wanted it to be honestly and I find the rating here on imdb way too high. The best and at the same time also one of the worst components of this film is the soundtrack. Sometimes it feels spot-on, during other moments it is too much in my opinion and hurts the film. So as a whole, a bit of a close call, but I give the film a thumbs-down and suggest you watch something else instead. There is not one production value in this film that won me over. If you still wanna see it, go for a good set of subtitles, even if you are a natuve English speaker.
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