PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 12/27/06)

Told through a series of five interlocking, named vignettes, The Dead Girl is Blue Car director Karen Moncrieff’s dark little indie thriller about a group of women whose lives are irrevocably changed by the discovery of a corpse. Arden (Toni Collette) discovers the mutilated body of Krista (Brittany Murphy) in "The Stranger." Rose Byrne’s Leah, in "The Sister," is the forensics grad student who examines the body. She hopes that the dead girl is her sister, missing since childhood. In one particularly creepy scene, her mother, played with a Stepford-like WASPiness by Mary Steenburgen, chooses pictures of her missing daughter for the flyers as if they were for a Christmas card. Mary Beth Hurt’s Ruth is "The Wife," a lonely, bitter woman whose husband disappears for hours or days at a time. And in one of the strongest vignettes, "The Mother," Krista's mother, played by Marcia Gay Harden, travels to where her daughter was found. The last vignette focuses on the dead girl herself, a prostitute and junkie who lives in a squalid motel with her friend and sometimes lover, Rosetta (Kerry Washington). Krista is trying to get to Norwalk for her daughter's birthday when she is picked up by Carl, Ruth's shifty husband.

Krista's body unwittingly acts as a vehicle for transformation for each of these women. Arden, so meek as to nearly cave in on herself, finally stands up to her shrewish mother, played with a scene-chewing nuttiness by Piper Laurie. The last straw is when Arden's mother alludes to a family secret about Arden's dead brother. In one of the most unforgettable scenes in the film, she goes out with the wiry, tattooed Rudy (Giovani Ribisi), a grocery store clerk. When he's not talking about serial killers, he's earnestly trying to figure out why the hell this woman won't kiss him, wants him to tie her hands with his belt, and won't take off her gloves. Their moment of truth is brutally honest, tender, and extremely sexy, though probably won't be to some moviegoers' tastes.

Each story could be its own full-length movie, and each is shot with a different style and feel — bleak and yellow for Arden, clausterphobic in Ruth's doublewide. Moncrieff, who also wrote the script, has crafted exquisitely three-dimensional women, including the dead girl. Like all of us, they have secrets and complicated pasts that can't be labeled good or bad. They don't make all make choices that create typical movie endings wrapped up with a neat bow, but they are all too real.

— Jenni Miller