Helen Leonard (Ashley Judd) is a talented pianist and university instructor. She has a great second husband David (Goran Visnjic) and teenage daughter Julie (Alexia Fast). She is fascinated with student Mathilda (Lauren Lee Smith). She is racked with anxiety and gets hospitalized where she finds Mathilda. Dr. Sherman (Alberta Watson) is her therapist. After struggling back home, she tries suicide and gets sent back to the psych ward. She finds solace with fellow patient Mathilda and eventually goes off to live with her.

Ashley Judd certainly tries hard to do some big time acting. Quite frankly, the acting is perfectly good. Lauren Lee Smith has a good role. However the movie has too many slow moving quiet scenes. It doesn't move enough to be compelling. It is a slow tired depressing watch. It's probably realistic but I've never liked watching depressed characters. They're a downer and this movie is a downer, too.

Helen is a drama starring Ashley Judd and Goran Višnjić together with Lauren Lee Smith,Alexia Fast,Alberta Watson and Leah Cairns.The film follows a professor who overcomes severe depression after a massive breakdown with the help of new friend.It was directed by Sandra Nettelbeck.

This psychological drama centered on the monumental inner struggle of Helen, a successful music professor and happily married mother suffering from severe mental illness. After years of suppressing her bipolar disorder, Helen suffers a crippling emotional breakdown. Subsequently hospitalized, she befriends Mathilda, who offers a sense of understanding and emotional solace that her family cannot. But in time Helen's suffering becomes overwhelming, and she begins to believe that death is the only solution. Desperate, Helen's husband and daughter fight to prove to her that life is worth living, and convince her that there are other options for overcoming her illness.

What is wonderful about the film is that it keenly conveys the profound isolation of mental illness and the futility of searching for someone, or something, to blame. In roles that could have devolved into arias of melodrama, the cast never overplays its hand, fighting the omnipresent melancholy in small ways rather than large.I gave it the highest rating because of this.

A painful movie about a woman struggling with severe clinical depression.

Ashley Judd has a knack for giving powerhouse performances in movies no one's ever heard of (did you ever see her in "Bug?"),and she disappears utterly into the character of "Helen," who herself descends into hell when her illness makes an appearance after lying dormant for many years. Let me be clear -- this movie is one long sustained note of agony, and it is not pleasant to sit through. But it's fascinating in its own way, and the thought of it haunted me for days after I'd seen it.

The filmmaker clearly had a very personal and painful relationship with her subject (she lost her childhood friend to clinical depression),and one might think this would make her incapable of retaining the objectivity needed to prevent a film like this from turning into melodrama, but one would be wrong for thinking that.

Grade: A-