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THE DEAD GIRL Send This Review to a Friend
Writer-director Karen Moncrieff’s offbeat effort to mesh a series of disturbing stories into a unified whole is more unpleasant than revealing. She mostly makes us wallow in the situations she constructs and populates with troubled characters.
The upsetting center is the discovery of a girl who has been brutally murdered. Who was she? What happened? The film tells parallel stories that turn out to be interconnected.
The segment that has the most appeal for me involves Marcia Gay Harden as Melora, a sympathetic mother of the victim, who seeks out her daughter’s roommate, Rosetta, played movingly by Kerry Washington. Rosetta is a hooker and is addicted to drugs.
It turns out that the slain girl, Krista (Brittany Murphy), had a three-year-old daughter. The humanity of Melora and scenes showing the Krista near the end of her life are the best and most interesting ingredients of the film.
But most everything else is creepy in one way or another without being sufficiently compelling. There is nothing wrong with the cast that includes Josh Brolin, Rose Byrne, Toni Colette, Bruce Davison, James Franco, Mary Beth Hurt, Piper Laurie, Giovanni Ribisi, Nick Searcy and Mary Steenburgen. A First Look Pictures release.
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