The Dead Girl

A shy, neurotic woman finds a body in the woods outside Los Angeles. She hesitates to call the police, although a pattern of similar murders has infected the area. A serial killer is on the loose - a madman who mutilates women before taking their clothing home as a prize.

From the moonbat who finds the body to the victim's prostitute lover, the murder creates a ripple effect as people throughout the L.A. community are touched, horrified - even soothed by the fact that the dead girl wasn't part of their family.

"The Dead Girl," written and directed by Karen Moncrieff, has a fascinating premise: It's a murder mystery that is solved halfway through and a revelatory drama that shows the killing's collateral damage through the eyes of five disparate women. They share little other than a tenuous relationship to the girl (other, of course, than the girl herself, a prostitute named Krista who’s played with brave abandon by Brittany Murphy).

The film is divided into five 15-minute segments - each one focusing on one of the tangential protagonists - that form an emotional collage of women on the verge of a melancholy breakdown.

There's the severely depressed daughter (Toni Collette) of a housebound harpy (Piper Laurie), the severely depressed sister (Rose Byrne) of another missing girl, the severely depressed wife (Mary Beth Hurt) of a shifty husband, Krista's severely depressed mother (Marcia Gay Harden), and, of course, the severely depressed prostitute whose death drives the plot.

As you can imagine, "The Dead Girl" is steeped in sadness; there's hardly a scene that doesn't involve Moncrieff trying to elicit pity from her audience. The screenplay relentlessly victimizes its protagonists in a quest to create multiple intertwined tragedies – a quest that succeeds only as an exercise in masochism.

“The Dead Girl” provides angst without understanding and a clever structure that belies a lack of depth. It's a glacier-paced jigsaw puzzle, a well-framed series of pictures that combine dazzling technical expertise with draggy, saggy emotions. It’s also a feminist equivalent of "Fight Club,” replacing physical savagery with spiritual punishment.

Moncrieff’s brand of naive misanthropy is usually the product of film school, where students are taught to worship at the feet of Kubrick and Peckinpah – masters who laced their screeds with the subversive wit. But the plot machinations of, say, “Dr. Strangelove” or “Straw Dogs” are secondary to development of the central characters (Kubrick's dreadful "A Clockwork Orange" being a rare exception).

Moncreiff, on the other hand, treats her characters like chess pieces in a larger scheme. She’s a relentlessly downbeat filmmaker, the type that is typically makes a prize pupil (film professors are easily gulled by the tragedy of the mundane). Moncrieff, whose previous experience is chockablock with TV gigs at shows like "Silk Stockings" and "Matlock," built up a steady resume in order to get funding for a one-note script she surely wrote at a tender age.

To the film’s credit, its performances are impeccable across the board; every scene is a beautiful acting exercise, starring some of the best performers around. Harden and Collette are heartbreaking, and Moncrieff is wise to limit their stories to roughly 15 minutes; further exposure would lessen their formidable impact.

“The Dead Girl” isn’t a complete waste – it’s just a chilly, unsatisfying drama that layers sadness upon sadness until the audience cries itself to sleep. It’s a grim imitation of reality where no one ever smiles and no one ever wins. The picture is as cold as Krista's body, and about half as lively.

Rating: **