A little more on the The Lovely Bones

...because what makes both book and movie so disturbing? In ways that I think the author/director do not exactly intend? The story takes on one of the most horrible crimes imaginable, the murder of a young girl, and ostensibly tries to help us come to terms with that, to in a sense feel that the girl is okay, in her afterlife. But really, short of a profound religious faith, which the book/movie do not touch upon, there's really no way for this to be so. Families can heal, they can move forward with their lives a little, but they will always be grievously wounded after a crime like this. What made this story so sensation was its supernaturality. It is anything but a crime story. In fact, the mechanics of the crime, deterctive work, punishment are handled perfunctorily at best. But did anyone actually feel "good" reading/seeing this? Do you feel in any way that justice has been done, that the universe is sound and whole? In a way, I think, you actually feel worse. The vision of an afterlife brings neither joy nor salvation in any way, just a strange lonely wandering and a feeble and spooky reach down into the goings-on of life, a terrible longing and loneliness. In the book, the febrile style masked some of the flaws in the emotional structure, but the movie makes the horrible nature (or supernature) of her being too real and concrete and we feel, or at least I felt, that the story was a tragedy and the vision of an afterlife was a horror, and I think the director (and Sebold) want me, us to feel exactly the opposite.