The Dead Girl

Karen Moncrieff makes good on the promise shown in her excellent 2002 debut, BLUE CAR, with a potent and superbly acted cycle of five short films about women who, though strangers to one another, find themselves at varying degrees of separation from the same murdered girl. In "The Stranger," Arden (Toni Collette), a depressed California woman who cares for her abusive, invalid mother (Piper Laurie, in full-blown Carrie's-mother mode), discovers the girl's naked, mutilated corpse in a clump of dry desert brush. But before returning home and calling the police, Arden does something unsettling: She removes the blood-caked gold charm necklace that reads "Taken" from the ...