After 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saorsie Ronan) is murdered, her soul remains between this life and the next, watching over her disintegrating family and the killer who shattered their lives in director Peter Jackson’s (“The Lord of the Rings”) disappointing movie adaptation of The Lovely Bones, Alice Seybold’s celebrated novel of innocence lost. While father Mark Wahlberg (miscast) struggles vainly to solve the crime, traumatized mother Rachel Weisz withdraws. Enter Susan Sarandon (comic and acting in different picture), wasted as the grandmother trying to hold the family together. The complex narrative—which juxtaposes actions in one world influencing those in another—proves to be the film’s undoing. Emboldened by his award-winning special effects in other films, Jackson delivers garish, CGI interpretations of the afterlife that suggest a cotton candy mishmash of surrealist clichés, dissipating the drama of the familial grievances and procedural whodunit. Gifted, sensitive Ronan (“Atonement”) is endearing as the tragic youth, and a chilling Stanley Tucci is the monster next door, with murder on his mind. But the film’s divisive tonal shifts undermine both its coherence and meaning.