The Lovely Bones

I watched The Lovely Bones on Saturday night. I enjoyed it, though I sometimes felt it steered very carefully clear from the full horror of the protagonist's murder, perhaps too much of which was left to the imagination. The acting, though, was excellent, particularly the serial killer, who was chillingly creepy. The scene in which the younger sister breaks in his house to find evidence of what he's done is genuinely tense, and I could feel myself fearing for her - which shows how much I had become involved in the story. The heavenly bits were okay, but for me a bit overly pretty in a CGI way and didn't really convery any sense of the spiritual to me. I hardly felt like she was really on the cusp of entering Heaven. Nor did I feel the other victims of the killer she met had gone through the trauma of rape and murder. Still, it was an effective piece of filmmaking and kept me gripped to the end. Not in the same league as The Others or Stir of Echoes, but a cut above the average.