God Help the Girl

Recently, I decided to watch God Help the Girl on Netflix. The film is directed by Stuart Murdoch and is described as an ‘indie musical’. The film is rated over 4 stars on Netflix, which is quite a high rating compared to most other films on Netflix, so this is what seemed to persuade me to watch it. However personally I found this film to be just a little too confusing, it seems to be one of those dramas that trys too hard to be all deep and meaningful, where the director try’s to make the film all artsy and creative. Similar to that of Frank, another British drama, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, which I feel also tries to be too deep with hidden meaning but instead I find it ends up falling quite flat.

Anyway God Help the Girl is about the band Belle & Sebastian and the director, Stuart Murdoch was the ‘mastermind’ behind the band. A girl called Eve, played by Emily Browning, starts writing songs that she then sings throughout the film, alone and as part of the band. She writes the songs as a way of sorting through and dealing with some of the emotional and mental problems she is facing. She then meets and boy and girl called James and Cassie, Olly Alexander and Hannah Murray, they are both musicians and alongside Eve, together they form a band.

Olly Alexander and Hannah Murray also play characters called Jakob and Cassie in the popular TV series Skins. Skins is a TV series I throughly enjoyed and found that both Olly and Hannah’s characters were played very well but the characters they play in God Help the Girl are practically the same as their characters in Skins but I feel as though it doesn’t work as well in God Help the Girl. They are sort of unexplainably quite odd in the film which adds to the confusion and the ‘artsy-ness’.

I could understand why people enjoy this film and how it successfully portrays the formation and career of Belle & Sebastian but it’s just not really my cup of tea. Personally I found the best bit in the whole film was when Eve wore a ‘The Smiths’ t-shirt because The Smiths are simply incredible. I feel as though Stuart Murdoch should probably stick to making music rather than making films.