The lovely bones
·
In 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon takes her
usual shortcut home from her school through a cornfield in Norristown,
Pennsylvania. George Harvey, a 36-year-old neighbour who lives alone and builds
doll houses for a living, persuades her to have a look at an underground den he
has recently dug in the field. Once she enters, he rapes and murders her and
dismembers her body, putting her remains in a safe that he dumps in a sinkhole.
Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven.
·
The Salmon family at first refuses to believe
that Susie is dead, until Susie's elbow is found by a neighbour’s dog. The
police talk to Harvey, finding him strange but seeing no reason to suspect him.
Susie's father, Jack, begins to suspect Harvey, a sentiment his surviving
daughter Lindsey comes to share. Jack takes an extended leave from work.
·
Later, Len Fenerman, the detective assigned to
the case, tells the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are
dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window
and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Thinking that it is Harvey returning to
destroy more evidence, he runs out to confront him, armed with a baseball bat.
The figure is not Harvey, but Clarissa, Susie's best friend who is dating
Brian, one of Susie's classmates. As Susie watches in horror from heaven,
Brian—who was going to meet Clarissa in the cornfield—nearly beats Jack to
death, and Clarissa breaks Jack's knee. While he recovers from knee replacement
surgery, Susie's mother, Abigail, begins cheating on Jack with the widowed
Fenerman.
·
Trying to help her father prove his suspicions,
Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a diagram of the underground den,
but is forced to leave when Harvey returns unexpectedly. The police do not
arrest him, however, which enables him to flee from Norristown. Later, evidence
is discovered linking Harvey to Susie's murder, as well as to those of several
other girls. Meanwhile, Susie meets Harvey's other victims in heaven and sees
into his traumatic childhood.
·
Abigail leaves Jack, and eventually takes a job
at a winery in California. Her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons'
home to care for Buckley (Suzie's younger brother) and Lindsey. Eight years
later, Lindsey and her boyfriend, Samuel Heckler, become engaged after
finishing college, find an old house in the woods owned by a classmate's
father, and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration,
while arguing with his son Buckley, Jack suffers a heart attack. The emergency
prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by
Buckley's lingering bitterness for her abandoning the family for most of his
childhood.
·
Meanwhile, Harvey returns to Norristown, which
has become more developed. He explores his old neighbourhood and notices the
school is being expanded into the cornfield where he murdered Susie. He drives
by the sinkhole where Susie's body rests and where Ruth Connors and Ray Singh
are standing. Ruth, Susie's former classmate who had felt Susie's spirit rush
past her immediately after she was murdered, senses the women Harvey has killed
and is physically overcome. Susie, watching from heaven, is also overwhelmed
with emotion and feels how she and Ruth transcend their present existence, and
the two girls exchange positions: Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body,
connects with Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and had made plans to go
out with her a few days before the murder. Ray senses Susie's presence, and is
stunned by the fact that Susie is briefly back with him. The two make love as
Susie has longed to do after witnessing her sister and Samuel. Afterwards,
Susie returns to heaven.
·
Susie moves on into another, larger part of
heaven, occasionally watching earthbound events. Lindsey and Samuel have a
daughter together named Abigail Suzanne. While stalking a young woman in New
Hampshire, Harvey is hit on the shoulder by an icicle and falls to his death
down a snow-covered slope. At the end of the novel, Susie's charm bracelet is
found by a Norristown couple who don't realize its significance, and Susie
closes the story by wishing the reader "a long and happy life".
We decided to look at the lovely bones because again it had the idea of something bad happening in the woods but also it left you with many questions about the film, which is what we want to do when we come to film our opening as we feel that if you leave the audience asking question, they are more likely to want to watch more of your film.
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