The Dead Girl

Synopsis: The Stranger (Toni Collette), The Sister (Rose Byrne), The Wife (Mary Beth Hurt), The Mother (Marcia Gay Harden) - their stories are all enmeshed by one person, The Dead Girl (Brittany Murphy).

The Dead Girl is, predictably enough, a film about death. But its examination of the effects of death is something a bit different. Instead of looking at the death itself, it follows how the death affects the lives of four women, before showing us the life of the girl herself. This approach has its strengths and weaknesses, the weaknesses being the stories of the Stranger and the Wife. While both are okay, they feel more like the tropes of the traditional American Independent Film than anything else, contrived even as they are slightly affecting. Slice of life stories of backwater hicks. The caricatured grotesques (especially Piper Laurie’s turn as a wicked mother) just don’t grab you. To damn with faint praise is appropriate, particularly when the other stories are far more powerful.

The Sister is a wonderful vignette about how without death we cannot get on with life. A missing persons case has dragged on for 15 years, and now Leah, the Sister, is on anti-depressants and desperate for her parents to move on. Instead, her mother (Mary Steenbergen) obsesses over which of the three old photos they should use this time for the latest missing persons poster. There’s a ghost in the house that will never leave, never let them enjoy anything else in life. When the dead girl’s body comes into the morgue Leah works in, her autopsy leads her to believe she’s found her missing sister. And suddenly she feels like she can live again, no longer bound by her parent’s obsession.

The Mother is the most affecting story, as Melora, the mother, chases down the life of her now-dead runaway daughter. What she discovers is horrifying but it leads into something strangely beautiful, and hopeful. The story of a girl who escaped something terrible, fell into something worse, and was fighting hard to escape. It makes the final story of the Dead Girl herself so much sadder.

All four women whose lives are touched by the girl’s death are transformed. In each case, it gives them license to live differently. It’s an interesting idea to explore, death leading to life. And in its short running time, The Dead Girl does a good job of showing the different ways that this might play out.

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