Features

  The Lovely Bones’ recently revealed trailer seems to emphasise amateur sleuthing, but you can’t blame the marketing people for being a bit disingenuous. Alice Sebold’s debut novel was never gong to be an easy prospect for film adaptation. The story is of the young Susie Salmon, raped, murdered and dismembered by a neighbour in the book’s opening chapters. She narrates from heaven, watching as her family copes with her loss and her killer prepares to kill again. 

The film, originally optioned by Channel 4 for Luc Besson, finally comes to the screen
in the care of The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, whose involvement is not as incongruous as it may seem: his New Zealand-based 1994 feature, Heavenly Creatures (a very early role for Kate Winslet), was a similarly dark and personal project. Highly critically acclaimed, it proved to Jackson’s doubters that he was capable of far more than the splattery horrors (Bad Taste, Braindead) that had constituted his output up until that point.

The Lovely Bones stars Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Mark Wahlberg and Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan, and is released in the UK on 29 January.

Further reading...

The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Picador
Buy now