The Dead Girl (2006)

A Masterpiece!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

I think most of the reviewers got a bit carried away here on IMDb, making it look like The Dead Girl was one of the best movies ever. I don't say it was a bad movie, not at all, it's certainly worth a watch, but it's not a masterpiece either. The acting is good, from everybody, but I didn't really like the concept of the story telling. For example if you like Toni Collette, like I do, you better be prepared watching her role in the beginning and then never see her again. I don't think that was a smart move in this movie. But that's how this movie works, you get to watch small independent stories about the event. I would have scored it a bit higher if it was not for the ending that I thought was weak. Other than that it's not a bad movie but we've all seen better.

I watched this a couple of days ago and didn't quite know what to make of it. I still don't really. Stunning beginning as we find the 'Dead Girl', or at least someone that lives nearby does. And she has a terrible mother. Then as the film progresses we meet others affected by the death of the girl, until in the end we see the final day of the girl herself. So this is not a film of an incident seen differently by different people but, more simply a film made up of several short films, if you like, all dealing with one of the pertinent characters. A woman director has taken full on the contradictions and difficulties in being a mother, a daughter, a sister and a wife. It is meticulously done but I wasn't always convinced. I can tell this was meant well but did I really believe in the serial killer and his wife? The girl herself and her mother? Central problem , I think is because we do not see these people interacting we remain a little in the dark. I know its old fashioned but if this has had a more linear construction it might have been easier to connect and believe in these people for as it was there was a certain dislocation, a coolness and a separateness that allowed us the viewer off the hook. I had no feeling that the separate sequences added together to make anything more than the parts and I think they should have.

The body of a young woman is discovered naked in a field. This film tells four short stories about the people around this person, and a fifth about the girl herself. It is an amazing achievement, like if Alejandro González Iñárritu made a film where the story worked. The first segment deals with the woman who finds the body (Toni Collette), her unbearable mother (Piper Laurie) and the possibly dangerous stranger she meets (Giovanni Ribisi). The second story is about a young woman (Rose Byrne) whose own sister has been missing for the past 15 years. Of course she misses her sister, but her life has been consumed by her mother's desperate belief that her daughter is alive (Mary Steenburgen plays the mother and Bruce Davison her father). When Byrne, working as a mortician, comes upon the young girl's body, she thinks it may be her sister. Or at least she hopes so. James Franco also stars as Byrne's co-worker who wants to be more. The third segment is about the killer himself (Nick Searcy) and his long-suffering wife (Mary Beth Hurt), an extremely religious and oppressive woman who has probably driven Searcy to multiple murders. Hurt discovers her husband's dirty secret. The fourth segment is about the dead girl's real mother (Marcia Gay Harden), who has to come to grips with her own failure as a mother (her daughter ran to L.A. to become an actress and instead ended up a prostitute). The fifth and final stars Brittany Murphy as the girl. It's pretty hard to watch so soon after her death. It's absolutely devastating. Most of the movie is quietly devastating. The second segment, even if it didn't directly connect with Murphy's character, was the most powerful to me. Byrne and Steenburgen are both undervalued actresses, and the climactic argument between them is extraordinarily powerful. My second favorite would be the fourth segment. Marcia Gay Harden is another actress who can almost never do wrong, and she delivers here (in a film of great performances, hers is definitely the best). I liked the other three segments a lot, too. Writer/director Karen Moncrieff falls into melodrama once in a while, especially during the final sequence (though she ends it at a perfect moment, encapsulating the film's major theme, of mother/daughter relationships) - junkie prostitutes are a film subject that is maybe a little too overexplored. But mostly she creates three-dimensional characters and moving situations. Her direction is not unique, but I'd rather have it straight than showy (screw you Iñárritu). Plus, the most overlooked aspect of direction is bringing out the performances, and she does that over and over again here. It's a remarkable film (that certainly did not deserve to be released pretty much straight to DVD, though I definitely see how hard this one would be to sell). I want to see her first feature and I hope to see Moncrieff find a place in actual theaters in the future.

I would have given this movie a 9 had it not been for the ending (or lack-there-of). The entire movie, except the ending, was great. The acting is some of the best I've seen in a while, and the script is excellent. The movie has this slowly unfolding story, with dark undertones, and doesn't rely on a cheesy soundtrack to creep you out, nor does it have room for over-acting. The whole story is building up to the climax... but it never comes! Where the climax should be- the movie just ends. The only complaint I have about this movie is indeed the ending. See- you have this story... told from 5 different points of view. The Stranger, the Sister, the Wife, the Mother, and The Dead Girl. The movie begins at the end, and then flashes back on all of these characters' personal story as it pertains to the murder of this girl. All of the stories stop at a certain point and simply move on to the next person's POV. This is to be expected in these sort of Quentin Tarantino types of story lines that start at the end, and flash back to the beginning. The thing is these types of story lines all end up at a certain point, and then the ending is usually explained as a whole, and all loose ends are tied up. This never happens in this story line, and it leaves you wandering.... why did they end the movie HERE? To me it made no sense. For this reason and this reason only, I gave it a 6 instead of a 9, because for me they left out the best part.