Review of 'The Dead Girl'

Films with multiple intersecting storylines often sacrifice character complexity in order to cover the extra ground of the narrative. Not so with the moody and tragic story of The Dead Girl. In a stunning debut as writer/director, Karen Moncrieff keeps the story simple and creates five compelling female roles in a film about faded hopes, longing and the hollow reality of lives gone awry.

Australian Toni Collette is looking after her spiteful mother in a small town when she stumbles across the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and dumped in a field. The discovery is enough to make her re-think her life and she sees an opportunity for change in the form of an obsessive delivery man (Josh Brolin). Meanwhile, the body of the dead girl ends up at the city morgue where a forensics student (Rose Byrne) hopes that it is her sister, missing for 15 years. But when the real girl’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives, we start to learn what really happened on that fateful last day of the dead girl’s (Brittany Murphy) life. Housewife (Mary Beth Hurt), in a truly mesmerizing performance as an unloved and dismal wife, helps put the final piece of the bleak and fractured jigsaw together.

Although some of the stories are forced a little in places to maintain the connections between characters, the performances – particularly from Collette and Hurt – keep you totally engrossed in the gloomy space that this film inhabits. These are women living at the dimly lit end of social consequence: without families, partners who care, or independence. Ultimately they have few choices in their damaged lives, and the dead girl who lies in the field is more than a simple narrative link between them.

The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Michael Grady, with much of the action taking place at night where these troubled and complex characters move between the light and the shadow, hiding their inadequacies from the world. A haunting musical score from Adam Gorgoni completes the moody candid sadness of the film.