The Dead Girl

Director Karen Moncrieff’s second feature film, The Dead Girl, is a bleak, heartbreaking series of vignettes that explores the various effects of a young girl’s murder. They look at death from all angles, beginning with the woman who finds the body and gradually moving closer and closer toward the primary players in the dead girl’s final moments alive.

As dire and painful as the film can be, it also touches on the way in which this death liberates the people in its path. It cleanses them of emotional burdens, reveals many truths, and ignites a fire in them to live their lives more fully. The unfortunate, desolate lives of these people come to a crossroads as the news of the murder breaks into their daily routines and shakes up their low satisfaction existences. The outcomes are brutal and sometimes shocking, but they also often contain a muted sense of lovely transformation. In grief, people find inspiration to confront the difficulties they’ve been living with and stand up for themselves while they opportunity still exists for them to make a change.

Moncrieff is perfectly gritty and minimalistic in her choices of photography, but it’s the impressive cast that truly makes this sad-eyed collection of soul searchers really come to life. Hollywood beauties Brittany Murphy, Kerry Washington, and Rose Byrne demonstrate a skill for transformative acting that none has ever really shown before. Washington in particular gives a performance of such distinct body language and intimidating manners that she’s practically unrecognizable. The same can be said of the often wasted but very talented James Franco who unleashes a heretofore unknown inner dork.

It’s not solely young Hollywood that wins you over with this movie, though. There’s also an ensemble of veteran leading ladies who utilize their skills to masterful effect. Toni Collette, Mary Steenburgen, Marcia Gay Harden, and Mary Beth Hurt all deliver devastating performances that are rich with nuance. While the younger cast members find truth by dressing down and playing with their messy, unglamorous appeal, the more established members of the cast intricately weave broken hearts residing beneath finely knit sweaters. Playing mostly conservative mothers, they each express through their pained eyes a wound that runs as deep as any visible laceration on the corpse of dead girl. This is not at all an easy film or a pleasant film, but with this kind of talent at work, it’s an unquestionably well done tragedy.

Grade: A