The Dead Girl
Dead girls are great motivational tools. Cinema has a proud traditionof heroic men happily fetishising female corpses to justify their two hours of angst. Hitchcock’s Rebecca, De Palma’s Black Dahlia, Twin Peaks and its poor Laura Palmer… and so, so, so many more.
New American indie The Dead Girl sounds like more of the same: five interlocking short pieces beginning with a mutilated body,all muted shadows and gothic overtones. (William Faulkner, not SiouxsieSioux.) Each section is titled something like The Wife, The Mother, TheSister; exactly the kind of roles that women are normally reduced toplaying in Hollywood. But here, these women propel the stories, and thefilm sidesteps serial-killer clichés to focus on the death's emotional repercussions.
Every story lurches more than once into unnecessary melodrama that even their Faulknerian airs can’t save - but as The Dead Girl gives great actors like Marcia Gay Harden, Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, and asurprisingly strong Rose Byrne meaty roles to chew through, themelodramatic chunks are worth swallowing.
Format: Cinema
Mood: Make a therapy appointment now
Keywords: Karen Moncrieff, Quintet of stories, Drama
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