"The Invisible," a remake of a 2002 Swedish film, is "Ghost" for teenagers.

It has those "rules" that movies featuring those in the afterlife always have you can't move anything physically, nobody can hear you. Of course those rules are bent by the third act.

It's about a kid, a wealthy, smart, literary "golden boy" at a Seattle high school who is beaten to death by a girl thug and her gang of loan sharks just days before graduation. Disney's Hollywood Pictures released the movie without previews or much fanfare, almost understandable, given several risible moments in the third act that involve the ghost of Nick (Justin Chatwin) screaming at his mother (Marcia Gay Harden), Annie, his killer (Margarita Levieva), cops and others who might be able to solve this crime by finding his body. The moments are semi-intentionally funny because they can't see or hear him.

Nick's spirit follows Annie around, hoping for revenge, trying to help the police or his mom or friends put the pieces together. Then, he gets to know her. He lost his dad years ago. She lost her mom. She hates her father, he hates his mom. She's his mirror image. His life worked out, hers didn't.

It's not that he excuses her actions. Even the fact that she and her gang assaulted him by mistake doesn't let her off the hook.

But the movie, by the writer of "Batman Begins" and writer-director of the last and least of the "Blade" films, finds ways to give Annie wriggle room for both Nick's sympathy, and ours. Writer-director David S. Goyer makes the movie a somber exercise in angst, a morose kid who dreams of escaping expectations by killing himself filmed against a grayscape of cloudy skies and shades of concrete. He also creates this marvelous arc for Nick, a pretentious, self-absorbed kid who learns how others see him, learns how he should feel about his mother only after he's gone.

Chatwin, the boy from "War of the Worlds," is nicely cast as the trophy son, the lad dressed and tressed to audition as the next alt-rock star. His best moment? The one thing that convinces him he's dead sticking a shotgun to his head (off camera), pulling the trigger, and swearing, LOUDLY, when he gets no results.

The slight Levieva is nobody's image of a tough girl. But she has the dead eyes and fearless physicality of a bully who doesn't care if she lives or dies. She plays Annie as a girl who's gotten away with shocking expressions of violence before, and knows how to scare her peers, her gang and her ex-con boyfriend (Alex O'Loughlin) because she's capable of anything.

There's a "have our cake and eat it too" attitude about Hollywood versions of such tales. That's why the afterlife "rules" change in the third act, why we can't necessarily assume anybody's dead or will die until the final credits. But "The Invisible" has too many traits of the better teen dramas emotion, a strong sense of the impulsiveness of that age, a few believable relationships to be a complete write-off.

Whatever faith the studio didn't have that they had something with merit and audience potential on their hands, "The Invisible" is one they shouldn't have tried to make disappear.