The Lovely Bones

The new movie The Lovely Bones is a disturbingly real reminder that there are some truly sick individuals in this world. 

The film centers on the Salmon family, who appears to be your everyday average working class suburban family with a handsome couple, their three kids and a dog. But their world is shattered when their 14-year-old daughter, Susie (played by Saoirse Ronan), turns up missing. After an extended search, only the girl's knitted cap is found with traces of her blood, so naturally she is presumed to be dead.

After the police fail to come up with any leads, Susie's father (played by Mark Wahlberg) refuses to give up hope of finding his daughter's killer and begins his own investigation which ultimately leads to the crumbling of his marriage, while the killer (who just happens to live in the neighborhood) is slowly coming unraveled in the midst of his desperate attempt to keep his sick desires and cravings hidden from the world. 

In the mean time, Susie’s spirit is unable to move on because she is not willing to let go of the life that was so brutally stripped from her. As she lingers in what they referred to as the “in between” she is able to see how the lives of her family members are falling apart while gaining first hand insight into the troubled mind of her killer.

This movie was by far one of the most creatively produced films I have seen in a long time. While the storyline in and of itself has been explored in previous films such as Ghost and The Sixth Sense, this one was presented against the colorful backdrop of what could only be described as a child’s imagination.

While the blaring message of the film was that life goes on in the wake tragedy, the underlying theme for me was that we can never afford to become complacent in our surroundings. We must always be aware of the things around us because the people that we encounter in life are not always what, or whom, they appear to be.

The killer was super creepy. This movie made me want to run home and hug my children and tell them that I loved them over and over again.  It also made me want to put 20 ft shackles on their feet so that they can never get too far away from home.  But at the end of the day, it is understood that you can’t watch your kids every second of the day, so you just have to do what you can and pray about the rest.

Overall, The Lovely Bones was a pretty good movie. I wasn’t mad that I spent the money to go see it at the theater, but I think I would have enjoyed it just as much from the comfort of my own home. This one gets a solid B+.