An adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel about an adolescent girl continuing to witness her family's grief after her brutal murder, Jackson's film is a mixed bag: the fantastical vistas in the afterlife and tension in the real-world thriller scenes are in keeping with what you'd expect from the
Lord of the Rings director, but so too is the overpowering mawkishness, as our fresh-faced heroine gazes with fear or astonishment upon sights of wonder with tears welling up in her wide-open blue eyes. In other words, she's Frodo.
One can only hope that Sebold's novel had more substance than the film reduction, with its potted folk-spiritual wisdom and frustratingly illogical narrative developments, such as when the mother's reaction to her loss is to take flight from her family, or when the director seems to have forgotten what the symbolic props that he established earlier on were actually supposed to represent. But one supposes not.
4/10
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