Video Outlet: Vision 5, Swakopmund
Film: THE DEAD GIRL
Director: Karen Moncrieff
Screenplay: Karen Moncrieff
Players: Brittany Murphy, Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, Marcia Gay Harden, Rose Byrne, Mary Steenburgen, Kerry Washington, Mary Beth Hurt, Giovanni Ribisi
Genre: drama
Rating: ****½
Despite the ghoulish title, there is little gore or physical violence in this intriguing and intelligent film depicting the lives of 5 women, all of which inter-twine, even though they do not know each other.

There are essentially 5 stories here, each one introduced by a subtitle. This format in filmmaking was introduced by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski in ‘The Decalogue’ and has been successfully emulated by American directors subsequently. This is one such successful film.
The first story, The Stranger, deals with a submissive woman, Arden, (Collette) who takes care of her infirm mother, suffering enormous verbal abuse in consequence. The mother (Laurie) takes anger transference to unparalleled heights. Arden discovers the body of a dead girl in a field and thereafter courts public attention through the media, thus raising the mother’s vituperation even further. She is noticed by an assistant at the supermarket, Rudy, (Ribisi) and accepts his invitation to meet. She never returns home but chooses to remain with this virtual stranger, even though he displays psychotic tendencies himself.
The second story, The Sister, demonstrates how a missing sibling can destroy the lives of the entire family. Leah, (Byrne) is a graduate student of Forensics: it is no accident that she is absorbed in the world of the dead: her sister had disappeared years before. Leah’s mother (Steenburgen) has an infallible belief that her daughter is still alive; Leah wants closure to allow her own life to begin. Initial hopes that the dead girl is Leah’s sister are dashed but the trauma of possibility help Leah to move on, to accept a relationship with Derek (Franco) as a starting point.
Story 4 deals with The Mother of the dead girl, who identifies the body and re-visits the seedy motel to investigate her daughter’s life as a tawdry prostitute. The Mother claims her granddaughter from foster care and extends an invitation of reclamation to Rosetta (Washington), the dead girl’s roommate, who is still trapped in a nightmare of drugs, violence, and prostitution.