TIFF 08 Review: Deadgirl

This week Jason and I attended a screening of “Deadgirl” at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Immediately following the movie, we came home and recorded a podcast review. That’ll be posted later tonight, but in the meantime I thought I’d write up a few thoughts.

Here’s a brief plot-summary from tiff08.ca:

“Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) are the kids you remember from high school as skids or bangers – dudes from the wrong side of the tracks. One afternoon, the pair skip class and escape their adolescent despair by quaffing beers and causing mischief at an abandoned mental hospital. Breaking through a rusted door that leads into a boiler room, they discover the naked body of a woman strapped to a gurney and covered in plastic. At first they suspect they’ve stumbled into the lair of a deranged killer, but the rusted entrance is proof that no one else has been in the space for years.”

I am somewhat torn on how to review Deadgirl. On one hand it’s a pretty effective thriller with some good scares and seriously creepy scenes. On the other hand, some details of the plot were so far out on the edge of reality that I had a hard time taking the movie seriously. That’s not to say that horror movies need to be realistic, or even “likely”, but there needs to at least be an element of believability to draw the viewer in. The movie characters have to inspire some kind of emotional response in the viewer, whether it’s sympathy, pity, camaraderie, or anything else.

Deadgirl almost fails in this respect because for the first half of the film I found myself totally disbelieving the reactions of one character. Jason and I discuss this more in our audio review, but needless to say it really took me out of the movie. Having said all that, at about the half way point the movie started to win me over. I was able to forget about the stuff at the beginning and enjoy the movie for what it was.

So what exactly was it you ask?

At its core, Deadgirl is a morality tale. We have two characters who are polar opposites of each other, and react in completely different ways upon finding the seemingly dead girl. JT represents all that is evil and depraved in the world. Imagine the worst, most sickening and immoral thing you can, and you will understand his character. Ricky on the other hand, is mister goody-two-shoes. He constantly wants to do what he believes is upstanding and “right”.

As the story unfolds, Deadgirl forces you to consider the moral implications of what you’re seeing on screen, and I think this is the central purpose of the movie. The fact that I couldn’t identify even a bit with JT may say more about me than about the movie, but there really wasn’t any grey area to the two characters and I have a hard time believing that any well-adjusted person could sympathize with him.

Even though there were some good scares, serious creepiness, and a whole lot of nudity, I would have liked to have seen a little more depth in the characters. The script was believable when you consider the slacker nature of the teenagers, but it was really pretty simple at it’s core. They spent an awful lot of dialogue arguing about what to do, who to tell, and how to act.

One thing I thought was really excellent was the make-up work. The dead girl was one of the best looking undead characters I’ve ever seen, and genuinely creeped me out for most of the movie. My hat comes off to the make-up artists.

So Deadgirl is a cool concept, that ends up somewhat simple in its execution. The characters are too black & white and this takes away from the moral question put forth. Otherwise it’s sufficiently creepy, has some good gore, and features excellent make-up work.

On the Zombie Scale, I give Deadgirl a Zombie Situation.