‘What am I now?’ asks the extraordinary Saoirse Ronan, her eyes welling. ‘The dead girl? The lost girl? The missing girl? I’m nothing.’ Whatever the flaws of ‘The Lovely Bones’, they’re not of intuitive teen talent Haley Joel Osment. The story takes place in a strange first-person purgatory out of which teenage Suzie Salmon, murdered by a serial killer, narrates her story.
This new movie’s ’70s-era clothes and cars are detractingly vivid; scenes often feel like the hyperreal dream sequences of Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’. ‘The Lovely Bones’ is a supernatural tale too, and Jackson, scripting with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, has amped up the suspense elements at the expense of delicate mood: an unrecognisable Stanley Tucci pursues Suzie’s younger sister in a Hitchcockian housebound chase that thrills to no purpose. There won’t be any justice here, and you can’t help but think heroically committed Mark Wahlberg and a sassy Susan Sarandon are somehow beside the point. It’s a movie that tips toward overkill— even Ronan’s voice is amplifi ed into a weird whisper. More quiet would have helped. Joshua Rothkopf