Susie Salmon (Ronan) narrates: she’s a fourteen-year-old with a doting Dad (Mark Wahlburg, channeling Kevin Bacon) and Mom (Rachel Weisz), a younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver), a crush on a long-lashed poetic boy, and an aura which attracts seething neighbour George Harvey (Tucci), who has built an underground clubhouse in a cornfield (complete with board games, toys, coca-cola and other goodies) just to lure ‘the Salmon girl’ into. Susie is murdered and stuffed in a safe in George’s basement, and her family cracks up – as the local cop (Michael Imperioli) fails to make headway, and Susie’s father takes to obsessively suspecting folks to such a degree that when he (and the creeped-out sister) hit on the real culprit it’s too late to get anything done. All the while, Susie loiters and watches on, accompanied sometimes by another dead girl – and wandering about a fantastical landscape, where the bottled ships in her father’s collection founder on rocky shores, leaves become birds and fly from a significant tree and trompe l’oeuil tricks evoke the fantasyworld created by the killers in Heavenly Creatures rather than the blunter ghostlife of The Frighteners. The problem is that Susie is apart from the action, and indeed disappears for long stretches: when Lindsey attracts George’s attention and becomes a possible next victim and does Nancy Drew housebreaking and clue-searching in the boogeyman’s house, Susie can do nothing. It’s suggested the ghost can slightly affect reality, dropping a fatal icicle on her killer, but not enough to move the plot on: which makes for a frustrating skewing of priorities that spills over to the living people, in an annoying stretch when Lindsey could be handing over vital evidence but is suddenly distracted by another plot strand about her parents’ feelings.