Opinion/reviews

Review: The Dead Girl

The Dead Girl joins Thelma and Louise and Boys Don’t Cry in the pantheon of wrenching, truly superb womens stories. Just don’t call it a chick flick. Beautiful, unsettling, near-relentlessly grim, the movie gives a million different meanings to “missing” – and of the pic’s many dead girls, only two are literal corpses. But nonetheless, […]

The Dead Girl joins Thelma and Louise and Boys Don’t Cry in the pantheon of wrenching, truly superb womens stories. Just don’t call it a chick flick.

Beautiful, unsettling, near-relentlessly grim, the movie gives a million different meanings to “missing” – and of the pic’s many dead girls, only two are literal corpses. But nonetheless, as a sober meditation on the phenomenon often referred to as Missing White Woman Syndrome, the film does little to temper that phrase’s inherent cynicism.

Not that it’s not clever – at times, the film’s emotional turns of the screw are downright ingenious. The beauty, though, is in the heartbreak of words unsaid, the things seen that can’t be unseen and yet must remain unspoken.

Masterfully spiraling ever-closer to the last hours of Brittany Murphy’s titular pretty corpse, the film progresses through melancholy curio, into heartbreaking irony, and winds up managing to wring hope from a scenario fair drenched in despair.

And after three acts of such well-turned elegy, you feel that looking the film’s hidden demons in the face may be too much to bear. It’s unfortunate, then, that the monster behind the door turns out to be somewhat pantomime: Murphy’s story just doesn’t have the pathos of those she leaves behind.

It would be easy to call this despair-porn, except that everything on offer – the unboxing of the Russian-doll plot, the perfectly-fulfilled characters, the subtle rhythms of motif and symmetry – give the story such weight and power that that despair never becomes self-serving.

It’s a film that asks a million questions, a character-study in murder-mystery costume. And yet its biggest failing is easy to pinpoint: that the one promised answer on which it seeks to hang all its lasting musings, is the only one it tries – and fails – to provide.