Fourteen year-old Susie Salmon is brutally murdered on her walk home from school and we are left to witness not only how her family deal with the fall-out of her death but how she struggles herself as revenge eludes her from an ethereal limbo world. It sounds like it might tread some dangerous ground for the more emotionally fragile amongst us, doesn’t it? Think again. It started off so reassuringly well, the acting was good and I even found the teenage Susie surprisingly endearing considering her propensity for mustard-coloured clothing. All too soon though we enter very gushy, very predictable territory.

Director Peter Jackson appears to have developed a little habit. Whilst this could be brushed under the carpet in a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, lingering in the darker pits of CGI depravity, here it feels grossly out of place. Susie’s limbo has none of the otherworldly quality it is desperately crying out for; instead it reminds me more of a theme park (of the Thorpe Park variety, Alton Towers is far too atmospheric). The transitions between this limbo land and Susie’s family feel uneasy and are a constant source of mild irritation. None of the characters actually get enough screen time to really make an impact either. Susan Sarandon (Grandma Lynn) initially felt like a godsend with a bottle in one hand, fag in the other. Here, I thought, is a woman who will drink some sense back into this family. But alas, no sooner is she presented to us she is snatched away.

Now I am no book traditionalist on the film/book crossover debate but I do think that some of the film’s emotional anaemia can be attributed to missing out key moments in the novel. The mother’s affair with the policeman, the fact that Susie and her crush have sex rather than share a peck when she briefly re-enters the world and the rape scene itself: casually forgotten. It’s as though an evangelical Christian has given the whole thing a moral spruce-up and efficiently filtered out the story’s impurities to give us a more family-friendly number. To stay saccharine in the context of child murder is, frankly, a miracle. It is also a grave error.