karen moncrieff Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We hear it on the news twice a week, it seems: A young dead woman has been found on the road, in a ditch, back behind someone's barn, etc. We give the news a casual listen, perhaps offer a brief bit of sympathy to the girl's family, and then throw our focus back into our own lives. The world can be an ugly place; best not to dwell on the more horrific aspects of it ... until we have to.

Karen Moncrieff's follow-up to 2002's Blue Car is a decidedly unique take on the "serial killer movie." The Dead Girl is not a mystery, nor is it really a thriller. It's more of an anthology piece that introduces us to a collection of people on the periphery of a horrible murder. It's not a movie about the killer, per se, nor is it a character study of the victim ... except when it is. It's a tough movie to describe, a tougher movie to "enjoy," but an easy one to recommend -- provided you don't mind a little darkness, gloom and sobriety mixed in with your indie-style ensemble pieces.

Karen Moncrieff's Blue Car, which she wrote and directed (her first attempt at both), is a complex drama that centers on a high school student who is both mentored and desired by her teacher; the film was nominated for handful of awards and was very well-reviewed upon its limited release in 2004, two years after it debuted at Sundance. And, based only on the list of actors lining up to participate in Moncrieff's new film, it appears that the highly-praised screenplay on which she based that directorial debut was no fluke. Among the names already associated with the film - an independent project entitled Dead Girl - are Toni Collette, Marcia Gay Harden, Giovanni Ribisi, and Mary Steenburgen, and Piper Laurie is in final negotiations to join them.

Moncrieff's film, the breadth of which stands in stark contrast to Blue Car's intimacy, "centers on the dark mystery surrounding a young woman's death, which is gradually revealed when the lives of seemingly uninvolved people intersect." Production begins next month in LA.