The Dead Girl by Karen Moncrieff review
Alienation and oppression are the recurring themes in this five act drama from Director Karen Moncrieff. Focused on the titular “dead girl” the story is broken up into five “chapters” each depicting the life of a person associated (however tangentially) with the victim. Instead of focusing on the incidents leading up to the crime, Moncrieff uses the opportunity to offer a glimpse into the middle class American dream, gone horribly awry.
The first tells the story of the woman who discovers the body one evening in her own backyard. She reports the incident to the police but her abusive, possessive mother is upset by this.
The second revolves around a young woman who thinks that the dead girl might be her long lost sister who disappeared years ago. The third act centers on a middle-aged wife who realizes, that her aloof husband may in fact be the killer, but is too dependant on her strange man to report the case. The fourth deals with the dead girl’s mother, who makes an unexpected discovery and the final chapter introduces us to the dead girl herself.
But plot conventions take a backseat as the director is primarily preoccupied in exposing the hidden violence and dysfunction inherent in the average American household. Moncrieff eschews the trappings of a thriller, and instead takes us on a painful, but ultimately more rewarding journey of self discovery and worth.
In the first story, the daughter is literally bullied into submission and silence by her bed ridden, overbearing mother. In the second the attractive young woman realizes she cannot lead a normal life until she somehow brings the episode of her missing sister to a satisfactory closure. In the third, the wife suspects that her husband is a psychopath and is most certainly a pervert, but is too weak and helpless to surrender him to the cops. In the fourth chapter, the mother discovers that her daughter had taken to drugs and prostitution because of her callous and careless attitude towards her child. Still, she gets a second chance at happiness. In the last act, we realize that the victim met her horrible fate largely due to an act of love she herself was denied in her childhood.
The Dead girl is not terribly original in structure and cinematic construction, but it remains compelling all the same. A better example of the fragmented obtuse narratives capturing the dark underbelly of America would be an earlier film Magnolia (1999) which was perhaps more expansive in scope and philosophy. But the Dead Girl is the kind of movie that gets under ones skin. The realistic performances, dark grainy cinematography and the decaying landscapes are all a far cry from the traditional settings in Hollywood movies we are so accustomed to seeing. The filmmaker effective establishes a gloomy unnerving setting that serves as a somber backdrop to all the going on. The third chapter (about the mysterious husband) in particular is suitably creepy. But by the end of the film a lullaby indicates there is still a ray of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel.
[rating:3]
