This mystery drama unfolds from a story about a woman whose whole life is fake, a fiancee who is obsessed by the missing fiancee, and a cousin who used to be a police detective. The film was based on the novel All She was Worth, written by Japanese writer Miyuki Miyabe. While the novel holds on the set piece of the genre satirizing the society of materialism, the film breaks out of the genre to describe the human instinct for survival. Also, while the novel depicts a criminal from the detective′s viewpoint, the film describes the assailant as an another scapegoat of the times, granting much importance to the fiancee. Estimation for a film requires a standard of its own, which must be different from that of novels. In this point, <Helpless> seems to well demonstrates the attributes for a film as an combination of entertainments and arts, which the character cannot but reveal concretely by means of acting. All the three main characters acted by Kim Min-hee, Lee Sun-kyun and Jo Sung-ha successfully express their own desperations. Especially, Kim is distinguished in the interpretation of the character. ′Hwacha′, the original title in Korean and Japanese, means an express to hell, once aboard, never allowed to get off. (JEON Chanil)