The Dead Girl -- 2006 -- R

This one promised to be a decent drama, and based on the description, it looked like one of those mutli-person dramas that revolve around a single event: in this case, the death of a girl. I figured it was cursed by a really dumb title, but might be a decent movie... I was wrong.

The movie does revolve around the stories of a handful of people and are barely connected by this girl or her death. We have the woman who found the girl's body, the girl who examined her corpse, the woman who was married to her killer, the girl's roommate and mother, and finally, the girl herself. I say the stories are barely connected because although they do have this girl in common, they don't have anything else in common and aren't connected in any other way.

What this makes for is more of an anthology film than one of interconnecting stories. Unlike an anthology, however, that provides a resolution for each of its mini-stories, this one provides almost no resolution for most of its tales. Again, it's not a definitive "no" resolution because a resolution of some kind is provided for each story, but rarely is it anything satisfying or gives you a sense of closure for the tale you just watched.

The girl's own story was appropriately saved till the end when we've already met everyone in her life (as well as people she won't "meet" until she's a corpse), so we have an idea of who she is interacting with. Yes, her own end is clear, and it was made appropriately sad in the telling. That piece was one of the better segments, made better by the introductions we've had going along. It still left something to be desired, but it wasn't bad.

So on the whole, it wasn't a film that stood out at all to me over many of the others I've seen. The characters are only ok because we only get a short piece of their lives with little build or relationship recognition. The plot was simple enough, though I would have liked to see more development there as well, but again, as we're essentially dealing with shorts with a common thread and not a full movie, you can only expect so much.

It was a good effort, but it would have been much better if the stories interconnected a bit better.