Product: The Dead Girl (2006)
Rating: 4.0
[3.5]--There is no surprise or justice or sense to the whole thing. Just sadness.
"The Dead Girl" offers a rather unexpected piece of storytelling. Actor-turned-filmmaker Karen Moncrieff knocked the wind out of my sails with Blue Car, her 2002 debut about a teenager who transforms a troubled home life into an uncanny ability to write poetry. After working on episodes of Six Feet Under and the woefully short-lived American version of Touching Evil, Moncrieff returns with an even more impressive feature about a young woman who, as the title suggests, isn't quite as lucky at escaping the dark elements of her existence.Unlike Rashomon, that great Japanese film in which a crime is recalled differently by a number of witnesses, "The Dead Girl" uses the victim as a trigger to ignite each part of the movie. The titular prostitute is played by Brittany Murphy, though we mostly view her as a corpse (it's her best performance ever!) because Moncrieff unfurls the tale in a series of vignettes that show the impact her death has on people she's never spoken to or even met. Like, for example, the person who discovers the body (Toni Collette) or the morgue worker who is forced to re-open some upsetting familial wounds.First we meet Arden (Toni Collette), a shy spinster who suffers daily humiliation from her demanding invalid mother (Piper Laurie, doing a riff on her crazy-mama shtick from Brian De Palma's Carrie). However, Arden's bleak existence gets considerably more interesting after she finds a dead body covered with ants. She even becomes daring enough to take up with an aggressive stranger (Giovanni Ribisi), and we can't help worrying that he might be the killer. Next, our attention shifts to Leah (Rose Byrne), who works in the morgue and thinks the corpse might be her missing sister. And our heart goes out to this sad, neglected daughter of a mother (Mary Steenburgen) obsessed with finding her long-lost child. We are then allowed a harrowing glimpse into Ruth's (Mary Beth Hurt) extremely unhappy marriage to Carl (Nick Searcy), who frequently leaves her alone while he takes mysterious trips. When Ruth finds evidence to implicate her husband in the serial killing of young girls, we wonder what she will do about it and are shocked at how she handles her horrific discovery. The fourth segment centers on Melora's (Marcia Gay Harden) efforts to deal with her devastating guilt over failing to listen to her daughter (Brittany Murphy) and her search for a little granddaughter(Elle Fanning) she didn't know existed.Finally, we discover what really happened to 'the dead girl' as well as the misery this murder caused her close friend Rosetta (Kerry Washington, wonderful but barely recognizable in this role). You may wonder why such a group of actors would flock to a little-known filmmaker like Moncrieff as if she were Spielberg or Scorsese, but the work they do for her puts a feather in each of their caps so there should be no regrets. The female performances are what really save this film. Even with a weak screenplay, the ladies never fail while bringing to the screen their characters. "The Dead Girl " is a very unconventional way to tell a story we've seen about a million times, and for that (along with the lean 94-minute running time), I am thankful. Keep an eye on Moncrieff - she's the real deal.