Back in 1973, Susie despairs over missing those John Hughes-y movie experiences she hoped to have - in particular her first kiss with unspeakably pretty and vaguely “exotic” classmate Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie) - and she worries for her survivors. This combination famously resonated for the 2002 novel’s post-9/11 readers. Susie’s memories are tinged with grief and frustration, anger and regret. Though her parents don’t know this and continue to live next door, Susie recounts the details of the crime for you, and the movie offers apt fragments: the dark corners of a death chamber George has built beneath a cornfield, horrific close-ups of toys he’s collected to seduce her into entering the place, and agonizing close-ups of her face as she realizes what’s about to happen. Her absence is made more painful by the fact that she was brutally abused and murdered by a neighbor, George (Stanley Tucci), who remains free and essentially unsuspected in rural Pennsylvania. Speaking from beyond her grave - speaking from a “perfect world” where she does indeed feel trapped - 14-year-old Susie here recalls herself younger and also observes her family and friends struggling to live without her. This start of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones is indicative of the troubles to come, as the film makes awkwardly literal the fantasy spun in Alice Sebold’s strange, provocative, and poetic novel. How neat and clever and constraining it can be. “He has a nice life, he’s trapped inside a perfect world.”Īh, foreshadowing. “I worried for him,” she says, even as her dad, Jack (Mark Wahlberg) reassures her. She’s looking at a snow globe, where a snowman stands alone. “Too small to see over the edge of the table.” As she tells you what she remembers, you see her - small and peeping over a table edge. “I remember being really small,” says Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan).

The lovely bones full movie