Director Karen Moncrieff acknowledges that titling her latest film The Dead Girl serves as a form of truth-in-advertising and that those uninterested in the occasionally disturbing subject matter might be better served elsewhere.
“I understand making an unrelenting film may make some people feel like ‘life’s difficult enough, I don’t want to see a movie that’s going to make me that uncomfortable for that amount of time,'” she told L.A. Times profiler Mark Olsen. “And I absolutely respect their right to go choose another movie.
“I feel like I’m making films for people who are like me, who like to go to movies and be shaken up, literally taken by the throat and shaken up for an hour and a half. And moved and forced to look at things that are ugly, forced to contemplate the darkest moments any of us can imagine.”
As I said on11.22.06, “The color palette in The Dead Girl is pale and splotchy, and the mood of it is down, down…all the way down. Moncrief, who wrote and directed, has invested herself and her cast in an orgy of dingy, hopeless, lower-depths misery. Her female characters (the guys are mostly creeps or louts) are either sad or traumatized or badly bruised, or a combination thereof. There’s no question that Moncrief regards them with the utmost compassion and respect, but she’s mainly interested in how it feels to be in their cages — caught, desperate, unable to escape.”