Under the Skin, film and novel

I really liked Michel Faber's novel, Under the Skin. I read it after reading his The Crimson Petal and the White. Reading Crimson was like getting my hands on an uncensored draft of a Dickens novel that is 100% honest about the sex habits of Victorians.

The film adaptation of Under the Skin is only very loosely based on the book. The film gives no back story and shows little direct insight into the protagonist's mind. However, in its own abstract way, it fairly successfully tells the story of the undercover extraterrestrial on earth, struggling and lost.

I often avoid watching film adaptations of my most favorite novels because I don't want to override my subjective reading (words on page) of a story with objective viewing (images on screen). But Skin's film adaptation was so loose that I lost not a bit of my subjective reading experience.

The back story unveiled only in the novel matters. Being sent from another world to secretly live among humanity in order to harvest human meat--a delicacy back home--is a chilling scenario. But because the novel is capital-L Literature, it doesn't come off as cheesy sci-fi/fantasy horror. The protag's longing for a certain associate of her species matters and is missing from the film.

The film's most powerful scene is not drawn from the novel at all. The protag, who catches her prey through seduction, finds a young man with a deformed face. The protag doesn't seem to have any sense that he is different and seduces him like any other young man. Their dialog is one of the most incredible movie dialogs I've seen.