-By Maitland McDonagh

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Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron) is a poor boy from Quincy, a picturesque Pacific Northwest town lousy with privileged jerks, but he’s found a way out: a sailing scholarship to Stanford that, combined with his male-model looks, is the next best thing to a guarantee he'll never have to go home again. Cue the lapse of teenage judgment that dashes his hopes: Charged with looking after his 11-year-old brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan), while their loving-but-harried single mom (Kim Basinger), a nurse, works a double shift, Charlie is torn. Should he stay home with Sam or attend a graduation/going-away party for his pal Sully (Dave Franco), who’s about to be shipped off to basic training? Charlie decides to go and winds up taking Charlie along, but as they wait at a quiet intersection, a speeding truck screams out of nowhere and changes everything. Sam dies and Charlie lives, though only after flatlining en route to the hospital: The EMT in charge (Ray Liotta) declares Charlie's survival a miracle.

Five years later, Charlie is still in Quincy and on the fast track to becoming the town's token sad eccentric. Having ditched Stanford and stowed his beloved sailboat in a cobwebby shed, he now works as a cemetery caretaker, the ideal gig for someone who’s not only mired in grief and guilt but also sees dead people. Determined to make amends to Sam, Charlie meets his ghost every day for the baseball lessons he promised before the accident.

Cue bright-eyed cutie Tess (Amanda Crew), one of Charlie's high-school classmates. She's back in town to visit her father's grave and embodies the promise Charlie threw away: In a week she's going to embark on a six-month solo sailing challenge, complete with corporate sponsors and savvy press coverage. A couple of fortuitous encounters later, they’re falling in love and Charlie must choose between re-entering life and hiding out among the dead.

To say Charlie St. Cloud is a hybrid of The Sixth Sense and the 2002 Swedish film Den Osynlige would be the spoiler of all spoilers were it not for the fact that few people who saw The Sixth Sense also saw Den Osynlige or, for that matter, its English-language remake, The Invisible. And to say Charlie St. Cloud is a polarizing movie is to pretend that the overwhelming majority of its audience is divided between fans of Ben Sherwood’s bestselling novel and teenagers so in thrall to Efron’s dreaminess that they’d watch him sort M&Ms. Neither the book nor the movie brooks any real discussion, because they're the kind of sincere but formulaic tales that either push your buttons or leave you cold.

Suffice it to say that that Charlie St. Cloud looks gorgeous (though between the dewy stars and the Vancouver locations, it’s hard to see how it couldn’t) and the filmmakers play fair enough that anyone who's paying attention will see where it’s going long before it gets there. That makes for a long, slow slog to the double “twist” ending, unless of course you're blissfully lost in Efron's blue eyes.