MTV Movies Blog › Rachel Weisz

FROM MTV.COM: Little Susie Salmon, 14 years old and dead, looks back on the world that's going on without her from a new vantage in "the blue horizon," a way station between the Earth from which she's been erased and the Heaven she'll soon call home. Susie (Saoirse Ronan) sees her family — mom (Rachel Weisz), dad (Mark Wahlberg) and little sister (Rose McIver) — being torn apart by her loss. And down the street from their house, she sees the man who murdered her, still undetected, still seething with pedophile furies. Susie's is not a soul at peace.

Outside the precincts of torture porn, any movie that forthrightly depicted the rape and butchery of a young girl would be unendurable (and probably unshowable). So in adapting Alice Sebold's 2002 novel into his new movie, "The Lovely Bones," director Peter Jackson was wise to mute the book's true-crime-style horrors. Susie's murder isn't shown, rape is never mentioned, and her dismemberment is only obliquely suggested toward the end of the picture. The movie dispenses with the usual serial-killer shocks (it's much less bloody than, say, "The Silence of the Lambs") to focus instead on building an atmosphere of thickening dread.

Continue reading 'The Lovely Bones': Girl Interrupted, By Kurt Loder

Tags mark wahlberg, peter jackson, Rachel Weisz, saoirse ronan, The Lovely Bones