Dir. Peter Jackson, USA/UK/New Zealand, 2009, 135 mins

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz

Review by Carol Allen

If you're a fan of Alice Sebold's novel - and I am - you will find that this film version doesn't stray too far from it's source. Jackson's screenplay sticks pretty close to Sebold's story of a fourteen year old girl, Susie Salmon ((Ronan), who is murdered in 1973 and is then trapped in a hereafter world, where she's torn between her desire for revenge on her killer, her longing to be back with her family and ultimately a desire to see them move on from their grief over her death. Because it is a film, more effort is spent on conjuring up the visual aspect of the "in between Heaven and Earth" land where Susie hovers - sequences which are a bit reminiscent of fellow New Zealander Vincent Ward's "What Dreams May Come", though not as lush and fanciful. And the amount of time Susie spends tied to her earthly concerns has been telescoped somewhat, but again that's a valid amendment, this time for dramatic pace. Otherwise it's Sebold's novel made celluloid.

If you haven't read the book or indeed this review, you might well think as the film starts out that this is going to be a "coming of age" story with the protagonist looking back on her teenage years - until that is she throws water in your face by her telling us that she was murdered in December 1973. Ronan is excellent as Susie, around whom the whole film revolves. She's grown up a bit since Atonement and she carries the film with considerable assurance. We first meet her as a very lively teenager, with a busy life, a loving family and embarking on her first romance with her good looking schoolmate Ray (Reece Ritchie), which makes the loss of that life at the hands of her murderer Mr Harvey (Tucci) all the more poignant. The murder itself avoids being over explicit. At first, like Susie herself as she flees the scene, we're not sure that she's actually dead. Particularly effective is the way Susie's afterlife environment changes like in a dream according to her thoughts, as in the way when her fleeing spirit returns to her home, it now appears to be emptied of her family and her own presence.

There are good performances too from Wahlberg and Weisz as Susie's parents. Weisz is delicate as porcelain, a once intellectual woman, who then submerged herself into being a mother, and is very moving in her total inability to accept the death of her daughter, while Wahlberg, given an opportunity here to play a more mature and emotional role than in many of his films, really rises to the occasion. Tucci is very creepy as the murderer and there is a very effectively tense sequence where Susie's younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) is searching his house for evidence of his crime and he returns home. And there is welcome humour and light relief in a scene stealing performance from Susan Sarandon as Susie's glamorous and outrageous heavy drinking and smoking grandmother.