The Dead Girl

Writer-director Karen Moncrieff follows her promising debut in Blue Car with a grisly but honest inquest into the murder of young hooker, and the other “dead girls” whose lives intersect with the incident, in five discrete segments: The Stranger, The Sister, The Wife, The Mother, The Dead Girl. Toni Collette is the repressed woman who finds the body, browbeaten by her invalid mother (Piper Laurie, in full Carrie mode.) Marcia Gay Harden is the estranged mother who comes to identify the dead girl and learns that she has a granddaughter. Mary Beth Hurt discovers she is the wife of the murderer. Brittany Murphy is the dead girl herself, and the final episode leads up to her demise. Each part is populated by familiar names and faces, who can really act. The film came out of Moncrieff’s own experience on the jury of a murder trial, and it reeks of authenticity rather than exploitation, but there is still a heavy odor of sadness and waste about it. Not a fun night at the movies, but a truthful excavation of tragically limited lives -- and deaths. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-65.)

Thank goodness this film completes my review of films on the Indiewire poll for 2006, and now I can tardily put that year in film behind me. I watched as many of the 200 films on the list as I could bear, excluding only unappealing genre exercises or gorefests. My next post will summarize my own ratings, in tandem with four different tabulations of critical consensus.