The Lovely Bones (11)

Dir: Peter Jackson; US drama, 2009, 135 mins; Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon; Playing nationwide; Premieres 11 March

On the whole equally moving and scary, this ambitious film achieves coherence against the odds. For how does a director go about fusing such incongruent elements as a dead narrator, a psychedelic afterlife and a portrayal of homicide detective work in the ‘70s?

Though Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings, King Kong) has shot a solid and exciting film, it has generally failed to impress the critics. Many felt that the film failed to do justice to its source material, Alice Sebold’s bestselling and critically-acclaimed novel from 2002. They have a point; it takes no more than six lines – lifted verbatim from the novel and thrown into the movie towards the fade-out – to suggest what was lost along the way to the big screen: a subtle and philosophical tone that Jackson has rarely had to strike to sell film tickets.

Still, the acting is surprisingly good, not least from Tucci and Wahlberg. The latter plays the father of the main character Susie (a dazzling Ronan whose facial communication is impressive). She plays a 14-year-old schoolgirl who is brutally murdered by the quiet, apparently harmless nutter next door (Tucci). So what if he plays with doll’s houses and is lacking in social skills. Surely he wouldn’t scheme to trap young girls under the ground.

The film’s major central part is an emotionally dense depiction of three parallel stories - smartly interwoven, not badly shot - that consistently raise the level of thrill and horror. It is really one long suspense curve, the climax of which is bound to take you by surprise. We follow Susie’s bereaved family (the mother played by Weisz), the murderer nervously dodging conviction and the ghost of Susie – her death is in no way her exit from the movie. She gently haunts her family while more tangibly exploring the technicolour outskirts of heaven. But she needs to accept her own tragic death before she can move on – the same goes for her family.

Various plot-significant objects and incidents pop up in flashbacks and serve to make the yarn a strong one. It’s a reliable technique employed unremarkably but it works. The psychological undertow is chilling, well worth the ticket price, perhaps simply because the villain is so believable and his crime so sickening.

The film owes a scene or two to The X-Files and Stephen King but more to the real life events they are based on. Zodiac and Changeling are comparable cinematic treatments of horrific (and real) crimes. Here you also get a slice of the afterlife that probably isn’t for everyone. But it looks cool.