The title may refer to one dead girl, but something seems lifeless about most of the characters in “The Dead Girl” – Karen Moncrieff’s would-be artsy follow-up to her refreshing 2002 debut “Blue Car” – a fragmented drama which spurts and sputters with the promise of a revelation it never delivers.

Boiled down, it’s an example of structure run amok. As films like “Crash,” “21 Grams” and “Babel” have become run-of-the-mill exercises in overlapping storylines, the technique has become a crutch of filmmakers looking for a new way to tell the same old story.

But with “The Dead Girl,” this technique of breaking the narrative apart and then piecing it back together has led to a sort of narrative vacuum at its center – an empty hole where a thing called exposition would typically reside.

The movie opens with the view of a field, and a naked, mangled corpse being discovered by someone deemed “The Stranger” (Toni Collette), a fragile shell of a woman who lives with an abusive mother and suddenly finds herself an accidental celebrity thanks to her morbid discovery.

That tale is interrupted by one called “The Sister” (Rose Byrne), about a woman who believes she is the sibling of that corpse and who herself feels like a prisoner of a broken family overcome by the agony of uncertainty surrounding their missing daughter.

Her story first gives way to “The Wife” (Mary Beth Hurt), about a woman who makes a startling discovery about her husband (Nick Searcy) which may implicate him in the murder, and later to “The Mother” (Marcia Gay Harden), about the estranged mother of the deceased now trying to reassemble her runaway daughter’s final days.

Given the film’s focus on women, and its bold attempt to simultaneously tell five stories of pain, loss and rebirth, there are plenty of reasons to like “The Dead Girl.” In each of the chapters, Ms. Moncrieff posits how the death of one woman can lead to the destruction, liberation, trepidation and desperation of so many others.

In some ways, it’s the classic theme of a pebble being tossed into a pond and the unexpected, far-reaching ripples that can result. But as structured by Ms. Moncrieff, the film makes a promise: That through examining these ripples, we will eventually come to understand the pebble more clearly. “The Dead Girl’s” fatal flaw is that at the end of the journey, when Brittany Murphy’s famous face appears on screen to recreate the final moments of this dead girl’s life, the film seems to be running out of steam.

She is a prostitute, we learn early on, a woman unhappy with her family who is trying desperately not to repeat the mistakes of her past. As the audience, we know all this before we ever meet her, yet that’s all Ms. Murphy’s performance has to offer us. Ironically, every other character advances our understanding except the one character at the movie’s center.

Alas, the least interesting person is the dead girl herself.

As an exercise in episodic tension – as purely a collection of disjointed short films – “The Dead Girl” is a successful collage, and it keeps our attention by at least provoking our curiosity in how Ms. Moncrieff can advance this concept in a third, fourth and fifth direction.

It’s when Ms. Moncrieff tries to tie these threads together into a larger picture that the flaws become unmistakable. Ms. Murphy’s character is a let-down of epic proportions, her chapter seemingly dead on arrival. And in the end we cannot escape the realization that we care more about the women surrounding her than we do about the dead girl herself.

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2007-03-14