Watch The Dead Girl For Free

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Absolutely Brilliant!

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Arden (Toni Collette) is a painfully shy and isolated living her cruel bed ridden mother (Piper Laurie). One day she finds a dead girl in her yard. She becomes the talk of the town and is asked out by the creepy bag boy Rudy (Giovanni Ribisi).Leah (Rose Byrne) is a dutiful fragile daughter. Her parents (Mary Steenburgen, Bruce Davison) is still searching for their missing daughter for 15 years. Leah suffers from the oppressive need to find her sister.Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt) and Carl (Nick Searcy) are a fighting couple with a storage place. She finds some troubling things in one of the storage lockers.Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) has come to L.A. looking for her runaway daughter last seen as a 16 year old Krista (Brittany Murphy). She befriends Krista's former roommate Rosetta (Kerry Washington).Usually a multi-storyline movie like this can be a problem. The common trouble happens when some of the story really disappoints. The good news for this movie is that every story is compelling with great actors. The movie starts with the amazing Toni Collette and never really declines in the class of acting. Director/writer Karen Moncrieff has crafted a very simple story. It's the powerful acting that elevates the movie.

The story of "The Dead Girl" is broken into five chapters - each focusing on a female character connected in some way to a corpse dumped beside a highway. The first deals with a socially inept young woman, who happens upon the body of a murdered girl during an early morning walk. Somehow the self esteem she gains from the discovery gives her the strength to escape from a constrained life. The second segment concentrates on a female pathologist whose older sister had mysteriously disappeared some years earlier. During her examination of the victim in the morgue, she becomes convinced the corpse is that of her missing sister. The third narrative fragment relates how a neglected wife handles the unexplained absences of a sinister husband. The main character in the fourth episode is the dead woman's mother, who arrives to identify the body, meets her daughter's room-mate - and in the midst of grief has an unexpectedly hopeful encounter. The last chapter tells the story of the murdered girl's last day, and how she came to meet her killer.Needless to say the film is no comedy. The excellent direction, strong characters and sensitive performances combine to lift it above the bleakness of its subject matter, and each of the episodes is intense and contains surprises. If one were being picky, one might argue that the placement of the victim's meeting with her murderer at the end of the film brings it to an unnecessarily downbeat conclusion - but either way, the story has a powerful emotional resonance.

Having recently viewed this film (several times) it has a story we may have seen the theme before, but it is so well-presented and with excellent performances that it should not be overlooked.The art imitating life aspect, in that Brittany Murphy in real life died tragically young, also adds an almost paranormal feature to this film.Toni Colette is excellent in the first vignette, as a closed off character taking care of elderly and verbally abusive mother (outstanding cameo with Piper Laurie).The next story involves Rose Byrne, the sister of a missing girl who is never found. The dead girl is at first identified as her sister.I will not add spoilers to this story in that it is so well-executed and directed, it really should be viewed by everyone (I have never said this about any film except perhaps a film-noir classic). Congratulations to writer and director Moncrieff, whom I predict with a few more works like this should be a valid nominee for Oscar. 10/10.

I would have given this movie a 9 had it not been for the ending (or lack-there-of). The entire movie, except the ending, was great. The acting is some of the best I've seen in a while, and the script is excellent. The movie has this slowly unfolding story, with dark undertones, and doesn't rely on a cheesy soundtrack to creep you out, nor does it have room for over-acting. The whole story is building up to the climax... but it never comes! Where the climax should be- the movie just ends. The only complaint I have about this movie is indeed the ending. See- you have this story... told from 5 different points of view. The Stranger, the Sister, the Wife, the Mother, and The Dead Girl. The movie begins at the end, and then flashes back on all of these characters' personal story as it pertains to the murder of this girl. All of the stories stop at a certain point and simply move on to the next person's POV. This is to be expected in these sort of Quentin Tarantino types of story lines that start at the end, and flash back to the beginning. The thing is these types of story lines all end up at a certain point, and then the ending is usually explained as a whole, and all loose ends are tied up. This never happens in this story line, and it leaves you wandering.... why did they end the movie HERE? To me it made no sense. For this reason and this reason only, I gave it a 6 instead of a 9, because for me they left out the best part.