The Dead Girl: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

Five stories compose the heart of “The Dead Girl,” Karen Moncreiff's disturbing new drama that's so unsettling, it likely will leave those who see it in an unqualified funk.

Emerging from this movie won't happen when you leave the theater, but likely hours later, when the chill of what's generated onscreen fades as you give into the necessary distractions of your own life.

From Moncreiff's own script, the movie's first vignette is "The Stranger," in which Toni Collette's Arden, a young woman emotionally abused by her tyrant of a mother (a terrific Piper Laurie, once again soaked in bitters), is walking in a field when she comes upon the smashed, decomposing body of the dead girl of the title.

Revulsion is Arden's first reaction, then sadness and curiosity. She calls the police and a media firestorm is ignited, with Arden at its center. Briefly, she becomes something of a celebrity, a recognizable face that draws the attention of Rudy (Giovanni Ribisi, perfectly sleazy), a questionable grocery clerk whose tryst with frigid Arden reveals her surprising penchant for S&M and his acute interest in serial killers.

Cut to "The Sister," in which a forensic student (Rose Byrne), working late one night, unzips the body bag that holds the dead girl, who has a birthmark between her fingers that resembles exactly that of her sister Jenny, who went missing when she was a child. Could this corpse be her sister? Her distraught mother (Mary Steenburgen, never better) demands it isn't Jenny, and an already fractured family continues its slow dissolve into a hollow of emotional disrepair.

Onward to "The Wife," by far one of the film's strongest, most haunting stories, in which Mary Beth Hurt's Ruth, a troubled, God-fearing wreck married to shady Carl (Nick Searcy), uncovers implicating truths about her husband that lead Ruth to an impasse. If Carl is indeed picking up prostitutes and murdering them, as she suspects, then what is Ruth to do when turning him in to the police would mean that she herself would have to face life alone.

In the wake of this comes "The Mother," with Marcia Gay Harden's mousy Melora working hard to learn what happened to her daughter--whose name we now know is Krista (Brittany Murphy)--by befriending Krista's roommate, the druggy prostitute Rosetta (Kerry Washington). It's their story of uncomfortable, unwanted truths that bleeds into the final vignette "The Dead Girl," with Moncreiff traveling back in time to reveal the mystery of how Krista died.

Also a prostitute, Krista is hardcore, every bit as raw as the cuts that eventually crisscross her hands, wrists and throat. She's so eager to see her child, whom she gave up because she couldn't care for her, she makes a day's worth of fatal decisions that lead to her own death.

At a critical point in this broad movie of so much rage, grief and anger, Moncreiff allows Krista a fleeting smile that turns out to be the film's sole flash of genuine happiness. It fills the screen for only a moment, but it's nevertheless one reason the film was made. In that unconscious smile is all that was lost within Krista when she realized that her life decisions had become her life mistakes. It's the reason we care for her, and the reason the movie resonates so long after it ends.

Grade: A-