At first marketed as some sort of frightening ghost story, people missed the point. It’s a ghost story, for sure, but the only fright lay in the meticulous detail of the discovery that life in its circular motion does have a tendency to relive itself.

It follows the short life and living death of Susie Salmon, a precocious young girl with a love of photography and even deeper affection for English expat, Ray Singh (played with great maturity by Reece Ritchie). Susie (played masterfully by Saoirse Ronan) finds herself in the hands of the deceptively friendly George Harvey, a paedophile who preys on the trust of young girls. She ends up the same way as his previous victims, another lost girl never found. However, her anger and desire to give her family closure push her spirit through the boundaries of space-time and allow her to guide all those who feel her presence to come closer to figuring out what happened to her. Throughout her emotional struggle to stay a force in her family’s life, the audience is gifted the most intrinsically beautiful film to come out of the first part of the new millennium.