What an Adaptation Owes the Story It Changes

A film can change a story’s protagonist, events and structure. The harder question is whether it preserves the problem that made the story worth telling.

Winter of the Crow, directed by Kasia Adamik, is inspired by Olga Tokarczuk’s short story Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw. Its official festival description places a visiting British academic in Warsaw as martial law interrupts the ordinary systems through which she understands and navigates the city. Polish Film Festival.

That premise creates a useful question about adaptation. When a person loses access to familiar language, information and assistance, how should an audience experience that loss?

An adaptation can explain the political situation immediately. It can supply captions, conversations or scenes beyond the visitor’s knowledge. That gives viewers orientation. It can also keep them close to the visitor’s limited understanding, allowing events to become intelligible gradually.

Neither choice is automatically more faithful. Each creates a different relationship between the audience and the character.

When viewers know more than a protagonist, they can anticipate danger and judge mistakes. When they know roughly as little, they must interpret incomplete signals alongside the character. A street, a silence or an unanswered telephone becomes a problem before it becomes an explanation.

The central adaptation decision is therefore larger than which incidents survive. It concerns who knows what, and when.

This matters because fidelity is often discussed as an inventory. Was a particular scene retained? Did a character disappear? Were the events rearranged? These questions are legitimate, especially when a change removes something important. But an inventory alone cannot tell us whether a film preserves a story’s distinctive pressure.

A screen version may reproduce events while explaining away their uncertainty. Another may alter events while retaining the audience’s dependence on a limited perspective. Those are different kinds of continuity, and they deserve separate examination.

Tokarczuk’s Polish publisher describes the paired stories in Profesor Andrews w Warszawie. Wyspa through characters whose certainty about their surroundings and themselves is abruptly unsettled. That description supports uncertainty as a question to investigate; it does not establish how successfully the film handles it. Wydawnictwo Literackie.

A responsible comparison must also acknowledge translation. An English-language reader encounters decisions made by a translator as well as by the original author. Before comparing dialogue, rhythm or narrative distance with a film, the critic should identify the edition and translator. Otherwise, language choices can be attributed to the wrong person.

There is a further responsibility when fiction enters a recognisable historical setting. The protagonist’s confusion should not become the audience’s excuse to treat everyone around her as interchangeable threats or rescuers. People who understand the situation possess their own interests, constraints and knowledge. Their lives extend beyond what the visitor needs from them.

For readers approaching an adaptation, three questions are more useful than demanding that nothing change: What does the protagonist misunderstand? What does the audience learn earlier or later? Whose perspective becomes more visible—and whose becomes less visible?

Those questions leave room for cinema to make its own decisions while keeping the source’s intellectual stakes in view.

An adaptation owes its source serious attention. It also owes its audience an account of the consequences of its changes. Keeping a title or premise is the beginning of that responsibility.