There have been two strands to Peter Jackson’s film-making. The most obvious is his bravura directing. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong showed a huge and fantastic visual imagination, putting him on a par with Spielberg and Cameron. But looking further back, particularly to his breakthrough feature Heavenly Creatures, we see a fascination with the darker side of human nature, that film being about the real-life case of two teenaged girls conspiring to murder one of their mothers.

These two strands are brought together in Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and if the confluence had truly worked it would have been film of the year.

Young Suzie Salmon chillingly narrates how she was murdered at the age of fourteen, and identifies her murderer as the man living a few houses down the road in a respectable Pennsylvania suburb. She is looking down from the afterlife – the in-between state – not yet sufficiently at peace to progress to heaven. It is here that Jackson gives full reign to his imagination, and many sequences work beautifully, but others strike an inappropriate note. Even allowing for the prospect of heaven to be full of colour and happy friendships, a sequence which looks like an out-take from a Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds video almost induces chuckles. Meanwhile on Earth, Suzie’s family are mortified by grief and not knowing her fate. Again, some sequences work brilliantly, particularly as we follow the fruitless police investigation, but others, like the visit of whisky-swilling Grandma Lynn, jar the tone.

Saoirse Ronan as Suzie is outstanding, convincingly combining young teenage charm with the wiser perspective of the afterlife. Stanley Tucci as the serial killer is genuinely creepy. Also very good are Michael Imperioli as the detective and Rose McIver as Suzie’s younger sister. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz are a little out of sorts as the parents.

A movie which is definitely worth seeing, despite its flaws.