Can't help but agree... When someone shooting a horse with a sniper rifle is the most action-packed and emotionally-charged moment in the whole film, you know you're in trouble.
To be fair, it's probably the fault of the marketing blurb for misrepresenting the film. When you read that it's an alternate-history "what if?" story set in a Nazi-occupied Britain, with the men taking to the hills to become resistance fighters while the women have to co-exist with the occupying forces, chances are you imagine something ... quite different to what's actually on offer here.
OK, no-one ever said it was going to be an action war film but, even so, the film's seemingly deliberate avoidance of anything approaching excitement, action, drama, or interest, still comes as more of a shock than anything that happens in the film itself.
Crucially, there's no sense of the wider conflict that's going on outside of the isolated rural village - and there's not even any real sense of threat from the rather affable occupiers. In fact it's actually quite an achievement (if that's the right word!) to take such a compelling concept and turn it into a film that's so small, slight, quiet, and still.
HOWEVER...
The DVD's audio commentary (from the director and the screenwriter / novellist on whose work the film is based) suggests they were very pleased with the adaptation - so, not having read the novel, I guess "it is what it is" and it is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the source novel. On those terms, it should surely be considered a success.
It wasn't what I was expecting - or wanting - to see, but it's not the film's fault that it wasn't what I wanted it to be. I think the blame has to lie squarely with the distributor for playing up the alternate-history war setting and not alerting viewers to what type of film it really was. If I had gone in expecting low-key human drama then I might have felt very differently about it.
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