The ones that made it to the screen
Psychological thriller books made into movies divide cleanly into 2 groups: films that found a camera equivalent for the book's central trick, and films that photographed the plot and left the trick on the page. The second group is much larger. It contains some perfectly good films, because a novel's mechanism and a film's quality are separate questions, but it is the reason readers so often come out of a competent adaptation of a favourite thriller feeling that something specific has gone missing without being able to name it. The missing thing is almost always the narration.
How a novel actually reaches the screen
A novel reaches the screen through a chain of 4 steps, and the book's mechanism is usually damaged at the second one. A producer options the rights, which buys an exclusive window rather than the book. A screenwriter reduces roughly 90,000 words to about 110 pages of script, and prose narration is the first thing cut because a script has no place to put it. Financing then attaches to a cast, which pushes the story towards whichever character an actor can be seen doing something. A director arrives last and shapes what survives.
The gap between publication and release is a useful indicator of how much reshaping happened. Liz Jensen's The Ninth Life of Louis Drax was published in 2004 and the film directed by Alexandre Aja appeared in 2016, a gap of 12 years, with the screenplay credited to Max Minghella. Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl was published in 2012 and filmed in 2014, a gap of 2 years, with Flynn writing the screenplay herself. The short gap and the novelist in the writing chair are not a guarantee, but they correlate strongly with the film keeping the book's structure.
The adaptations that kept what made the book work
The adaptations that kept what made the book work did it by translating the mechanism rather than by being faithful to the events. Faithfulness to plot is easy and is not the thing that matters.
- Gone Girl (2014, directed by David Fincher) preserved the two-track structure so the audience is misled by form, exactly as the reader is.
- Room (2015, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, screenplay by Emma Donoghue) committed to the child's eye line and built the shot design around what a 5 year old can see.
- Rosemary's Baby (1968, directed by Roman Polanski) kept Ira Levin's structure almost intact and let the ambiguity about the heroine's sanity run for most of the film.
- The Handmaiden (2016, directed by Park Chan-wook) moved Sarah Waters's Fingersmith from Victorian England to Korea under Japanese occupation, changed nearly every surface detail, and kept the double-cross architecture that makes the novel work.
- Les Diaboliques (1955, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot) took a Boileau-Narcejac novel and reproduced its withholding so precisely that the film has been imitated ever since.
Of those 5, 2 change a great deal. The Handmaiden relocates a whole culture. That is the point: distance travelled on plot and setting is not the measure. Distance travelled on the mechanism is.
The adaptations that lost the thing that made them work
The adaptations that lost the thing that made them work almost all lost it in the same place, by converting a first-person novel into a third-person film and giving the investigating role to whichever adult character could physically move around. The book's doubt was located in the reader's relationship with a voice. The film relocates it to a plot.
Jensen's novel alternates between Louis, narrating from inside a coma in a voice that is funny, evasive and 9 years old, and the doctor treating him. The reader is inside both unreliable accounts and outside the truth.
The 2016 film retains the boy's voice-over and relocates the story from France to the North American Pacific coast, but reorganises itself around the doctor as the figure who investigates, doubts and is watched by the audience from outside.
The Girl on the Train (2016, directed by Tate Taylor) moved Paula Hawkins's commuter line from London to the New York suburbs and, more damagingly, could not reproduce a narrator whose blackouts delete the evidence, since the camera records whatever it is pointed at. Solaris has been filmed twice, by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh in 2002, and both films are respectable while neither reproduces Lem's central proposition that the ocean is genuinely unknowable rather than metaphorical. Netflix's Rebecca (2020, directed by Ben Wheatley) has the events of du Maurier's novel and not its narrator's self-erasure, which was the novel.
The pattern behind which ones survive
The pattern is that survival tracks the mechanism, not the genre, the budget or the fidelity of the plot. Ranked by how reliably they cross:
| Work | Book | Film | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rosemary's Baby | 1967 | 1968 | |
| Gone Girl | 2012 | 2014 | |
| Room | 2010 | 2015 | |
| Rebecca | 1938 | 1940, 2020 | |
| The Girl on the Train | 2015 | 2016 | |
| The Ninth Life of Louis Drax | 2004 | 2016 | |
| Fingersmith / The Handmaiden | 2002 | 2016 | |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | 1962 | 1975 |
Read that table with the previous section in mind. The Handmaiden travels further than any other entry and is the best adaptation on the list, because the distance is in setting and surface while the machinery is intact. The Girl on the Train travels half as far and loses more, because what it moved was the narration.
What this predicts about the ones not yet filmed
This predicts, fairly reliably, which unfilmed psychological thrillers will stay unfilmed. Novels whose plot would be thin without the voice carrying it, such as Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory (1984) and Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992), have been discussed as adaptations for decades without arriving. Novels with a sturdy plot underneath the interiority get made repeatedly, which is why there are 2 Solaris films, 2 Rebecca films and 2 screen versions of Patricia Highsmith's first Ripley novel before counting television.