The Dead Girl

Anytime a filmmaker places the conclusion of the film’s plot at the start, they are going to have to work hard to make a compelling piece of cinema. 

Films like Pulp Fiction, American Beauty and Memento have famously played with narrative structure. Despite giving away key plot conclusions early in the narrative, they were all classic and compelling films.

The Dead Girl is a film that gives away the conclusion in the title. We know how the life of the Dead Girl (Brittany Murphy) is going to end.

Director Karen Moncrieff is hoping that the account of how the Dead Girl came to be a dead girl will make for compelling cinema. She has used a similar format to films like Crash and Short Cuts to tell the story. The stories of five seemingly disparate people are brought together through their connection to the Dead Girl.

The five stories are like five short films, each one revealing a little more about how the death of the Dead Girl affected the lives of those around her. Each of the five stories stand alone and, in my opinion, vary in success.

The first is ‘The Stranger’. A woman (Toni Collette) finds the Dead Girl’s body. The publicity generated by her discovery allows her to break away from her mother’s abusive control. She forms an unlikely bond with the mysterious Rudy, a bag packer at the local supermarket.

The pair have a sexual encounter near the site where the Dead Girl’s body was found and a piece of jewellery that the woman finds and steals from the Dead Girl’s body plays a central role in their connection.

I found this first story to be distasteful. I thought it had nothing to say other than that two people can find connection through a morbid event and find comfort in each other, however in appropriate it may be.

I thoroughly enjoyed the second narrative, however. In ‘The Sister’, Rose Byrne plays a forensics graduate student who is torn between her mother’s pressure to hold onto hope for her abducted sister’s return and her longing to move forward in her own life. When she examines the Dead Girl, she is convinced that she has found the body of her missing sister, finally releasing her from her burden.

However, the mother does not want to believe this could be her daughter but holds onto what seems like false hope. I found the daughter’s urge to move on reminiscent of Jesus’ words in the Gospels to follow him, and ‘let the dead bury their own dead’.

While we must mourn for those departed, we are called to move on, because God’s purposes for the living are greater than even the memories of those lost.

I found ‘The Wife’ segment the hardest to watch. We are placed inside the home of the serial killer and his wife. All the wife knows is that her husband is spending a lot of time out, which she hates. However, after he leaves one night, she does some searching and finds disturbing evidence that all but implicates her husband.

The choice the wife makes about how to deal with the discovery will tear at the moral core of any viewer. It is a reminder to us as Christians that we don’t just have a responsibility to do good, but also to expose and fight bad.

The fourth narrative, ‘The Mother’ is a heartbreaking insight into the life of the Dead Girl’s mother. We see that she was unaware of the abuse that caused her daughter to flee home and pursue a life of prostitution. There is a wonderful story of grace shown here as the mother seeks to make up for inadequacies in caring for her departed daughter, by helping out her dead daughter’s down and out best friend. The theme of adoption in this story is a small picture of what Christians are so thankful for in their heavenly father’s work through Christ.

The final chapter, ‘The Dead Girl’, is a forgone conclusion. We are shown the messed up, abusive life that the Dead Girl chose. She has a tough and handsome, but abusive boyfriend. She is violent, vulgar and only thinks about the short term. However, she still has some honour. She wants to care for her daughter in a way that she felt she was not cared for by her mother. Sadly, her boyfriend’s decision to not drive her to the town where her daughter lives leads to her death.

The film’s merits are that it brings up themes of adoption, redemption and moving on after death. However, I felt it had the opportunity to make a larger comment about parenthood and love, but didn’t. I also felt it was a few shades too bleak, even for me. And I don’t mind bleak. 

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