The Dead Girl (2006)

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.