I have a longer review of this, but unfortunately it breaches the 1k word limit of IMDb, so I will be rather succinct.
I had the pleasure of watching this at the Leeds Film Festival as part of Night of the Dead. At first I was apprehensive, expecting perhaps another 'torture-porn' indie film.
Instead, I got a powerful probe into the human psyche and the limits of human capability and barbarity.
The two main characters are enthralling and thoroughly explored, it is this subtle psychological study juxtaposed with the stark brutality of the films heavier moments that make this so powerful. Gritty, grainy, and teetering between realism, fantasy, and science-fiction, deadgirl is a horror that raises the bar on context, delivery, and emotional impact. It is probably the best US horror I have seen in recent memory, and its rating here on IMDb seems to reflect people taking it on at a superficial value only.
However, the film also knows is limits, it does not plunge into the sea of self indulgent artistic pretence. Instead, it stays afloat and allows you to glimpse down and take what you want from it, to empathise with who you deem worthy, and cast the sinister question of just what would YOU do in a room where society's laws are locked away in the background, your own state of nature in the metallic underbelly of an abandoned mental asylum. Would you return to the banality of suburban school life? Would you act on feral urge or try and do what you perceive to be the right thing.
Recommended.
