(2009) After revisiting some childhood memories (a penguin trapped in its perfect world of a snowglobe) from twelve years before and her more recent heroic race through town to the hospital in a red Mustang convertible to save her little brother's life, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old girl with the ambition of becoming a photographer and the anticipation of her first date with senior Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie) at the gazebo in the mall on Saturday, informs us that she was murdered on December 6th, 1973, in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

In his fantasy film, adapted from Alice Sebold's novel, director and co-producer Peter Jackson (co-screenwriter with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) allows us to see the world Susie has left behind, as well as the limbo in which she finds herself before entering heaven (sunshine drenched pastel pastoral paradise of children laughing and running through golden fields of grain), through a juvenile's eyes and mind.

As with many of her memories of her abbreviated life (eventually when she reaches her final destination, her guide Holly explains while encouraging her to look forward not backwards - "You can't go back" - she will have "no memory, no grave"), Susie apparently has amnesia about the horror of what's occurred to her; she only gradually realizes, wandering through the town, that she's invisible to everyone except Ruth Connors, a teenage psychic, who gets a glimpse of her as she's slipping away.

At first she seems to escape from the underground abode her creepy neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) excavated beneath a cornfield and lured her to enter. But later within a vacant white environment of mist she sees a man with his face covered, lying in a bathtub, mud and blood on the floor, and a straightedge razorblade on the sink.

At home where he resides alone George (never married) constructs elaborate dollhouses; after Susie's disappearance her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) destroys all but one of the glass-bottles containing his miniature ships, which he places in a window and sets a candle atop it. ("It's okay," Susie acknowledges her father's unceasing love for her: "My dad knows I'm here … in my own perfect world.")

No body is found, only the wool cap Susie's mother Abigail (Rachel Weisz) knitted for her and lots of blood in the cornfield; Detective Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) interviews George, who attracts no suspicions. "Life was leaving me," Susie tells us: "But I wasn't afraid." Unable to reach Ray, waiting for her at the gazebo, she sinks into an underwater world where George casts her charm bracelet.

Jack keeps his promise to Susie of developing each month one of her many rolls of film taken with her camera before her death while George, feeling comfortable and safe, will again feel the need arising after devouring his memories of Susie. "It had to be someone she knew," Jack insists to Det Fenerman.

Eleven months later with Jack obsessed with finding his daughter's killer while Abigail is "not coping," Grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon) moves in with her cigarettes and liquor, announcing to everyone: "I'm in charge." Following this intermission of comic relief, Abigail leaves her two children, Jack, and the tomb (Susie's room, with posters of David Cassidy on the wall and door, left exactly as on the day of her disappearance) at the center of her home and life, to work in the orchards of Santa Rosa.

From her "blue horizon between heaven and earth" (or as her little brother Buckley says of her being "in the in-between") Susie observes her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) having her first kiss with a boyfriend (something she herself had been denied) as well as Ray and Ruth's developing relationship together; over and over she has the same dream, hearing voices of the dead and seeing a house with a beckoning door, from which, like Mr Harvey's underground room, she understands she can never come out if she enters.

"When I was alive I never hated anyone," says Susie, now wanting revenge. In his backyard George begins building a hunter's blind for his next victim; Jack with the help of Susie's communication turns his full attention on George (though Fenerman warns him: "You need evidence") and then with a baseball bat in hand follows the neighbor at night into the cornfield.

As in a horror movie, Susie by herself walks through the doorway of the haunted house of George's past while at the same time his dwelling gets broken into.

In the dialogue at least twice George's house is referred to as "the green house," but it's actually a pale-blue, clapboard, two-story residence.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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