Adultery, death, child molestation: Centering on the brutal rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” is one grief filled set-piece after another. Except it’s got Susan Sarandon laughing all the way to the suburbs.

“I play kind of the comic relief,” Sarandon said of her role as Grandma Lynn in the upcoming production. “She’s [a] drinking, hard shooting, smoking [old lady] cutting across all of the pain, pain, pain. Whenever I possibly can blow smoke in someone’s face I’m doing it!”

It’s a mixture of tones that’s indicative of the overall production, Sarandon said, insisting that fans who only know Jackson for “Lord of the Rings” and “King Kong” are going to be “surprised.”

“I haven’t figured out the tone of the movie, I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it is. It’s going to be a strange jumble of things,” the Oscar winner confessed. “But Peter Jackson did ‘Heavenly Creatures.’ It’s [a lot] like that.”

But take heart fantasy fans: what has Sarandon most excited about the movie isn’t tone but a special effect — a very special, special effect.

“I think that probably the heaven sequences will work better in the film than they did, for me, in the book,” she enthused.

So what does Jackson’s vision of the afterlife look like? Just where is heaven anyway?

“Heaven? It’s in New Zealand,” Sarandon laughed, referencing WETA Digital, Jackson’s SFX house Down Under. “I don’t go!”