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March 2, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Not even strong acting can revive The Dead Girl

Not even strong acting can revive The Dead Girl

By Alessandra Carreon | For the Thresher

Director Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl is the segmented tale of a woman’s murder and the lives peripherally affected by its subsequent events. Though at times smacking heavily of a Lifetime movie with the lesson that all women on this planet are prey to men, The Dead Girl boasts a seasoned cast whose acting talents fail to translate into screen time.

Divided into five separate episodes, the movie begins with “The Stranger.” As the film opens, Arden (Little Miss Sunshine’s Toni Collette) is strolling through her rural California property when she stumbles upon — well, a dead girl (8 Mile’s Brittany Murphy). The dead girl is the central, unifying element of the entire movie and drives each of the five mini-films to their unsatisfying conclusions.

Arden is a meek, timid woman who tends to her emotionally abusive mother (Carrie’s Piper Laurie in another unstable mother role). Arden decides to escape her life and run away with creepy grocery store employee Rudy (Flight of the Phoenix’s Giovanni Ribisi). Rudy is all too well-versed in the modus operandi of various serial killers and is fascinated by Arden’s discovery of such a gruesome crime. Unfortunately, Arden and Rudy never reappear in the film and thus exemplify the movie’s theme of unfinished business. Unrelated storylines are introduced only to be tangentially connected to the infamous dead girl.

The film’s next episode is “The Sister.” The moving sentiment of this chapter is a family painfully enduring the search for a lost daughter and sister; a quest that permeates the remaining daughter’s career and life. Leah (Marie Antoinette’s Rose Byrne) is a forensics graduate student who is convinced that the dead girl she is assigned to study is, in fact, her long-lost sister Jenny. Her disbelieving parents (Elf’s Mary Steenburgen and X-Men’s Bruce Davison) are sure Jenny is still alive, and continue their search despite Leah’s certainty. The couple’s parental instincts are confirmed when the dead girl’s name — Krista — is discovered. The weakness of this segment again lies in the almost simultaneous introduction and permanent removal of characters from the screen with no development whatsoever. James Franco (Spider-Man) makes an appearance as Leah’s lover, Derek, yet his performance is nothing more than a cameo.

The third and most revealing episode of the film is “The Wife.” Neglected by her husband and left alone in their modest accommodations for one evening too many, Ruth (Lady in the Water’s Mary Beth Hurt) makes a startling discovery about her spouse Carl (Flicka’s Nick Searcy). This segment of the film shocks the viewer, approaching a contrived climax that only leads into the fourth episode, “The Mother.”

In “The Mother,” viewers discover the dead girl has left behind her three-year-old daughter, raised in the ruins of Los Angeles’ seedier sector. The movie’s setting is always a dark depiction of less than desirable surroundings: Slums, meager households and dark, sinister homes provide the backdrop for the movie’s progression.

An underlying wave of disaster carries over from segment to segment within the film. The characters, despite laudable acting, only provide enough information to cause a sensation for a given scene, then immediately recede into a fixedly hopeless void from the movie. The only real presence throughout the movie is the discovery of, discussion of, questioning of and murdering of the dead girl.

The film culminates with the aptly-titled “The Dead Girl.” Through flashbacks, the vignettes nonlinearly presented throughout the film are finally connected as the audience watches the inevitable murder of Krista. Murphy as Krista convincingly plays the role of the proud, broken, uneducated and still so hopeful mother, hooker, girlfriend and lost daughter. Still, like every other character in the film, Murphy can do nothing more than appear and disappear within a short span of 20 minutes.

Moncrieff’s fascination with death and ominous storylines leave viewers with an uneasy feeling. This uneasiness stems from a glaringly unhappy history — a history repeated five times, each time with a different label. Although sad and despairing enough to suit the film, the acting is abrupt, and the kaleidoscope effect of compiled episodes exhausts viewers who seek a single line of progression. The Dead Girl’s disorienting nonlinearity only exacerbates the film’s over-the-top dramatics. The movie reeks of the exaggerated histrionics that have come to characterize Lifetime’s Movies of the Week. Rather than emulate real life, The Dead Girl dramatizes every serial killer murder from the past decade and condenses them into a single film, from here to California.

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