I wanted to take that journey with her again here. It’s unfair to compare this version to the lush cinema version, but it is fair to expect the confines of the story be kept. The manner may differ, the players may differ, and all is well; but the tale should be recognisable. If the screenwriter (Andrew Davies) wished to write a sequel, a new ‘slant’ on the story would be understandable - the characters would have been borrowed, but the story would have been his.

Instead, Davies 'reworked' the original. He presented it using the same title, characters and dialogue. He simply bookended it with his own scenes, changing the story in so doing. He does borrow heavily from the novel; but it's as if a magnificent ship were crunched and twisted and scattered across the ocean floor. Can we make sense of the wreckage such as we find it? Or are the parts unrecognisable even in their new configuration?

Whole scenes are shoplifted from the original work, but their original meaning is lost entirely in their new context. Not only that, but the absence of a point of view makes emotional impact impossible. There is no story arc here, no emotional crescendo. No center. We are left unsure what's going on, let alone how to feel about it. The fictional characters seem to feel the same. Characters appear here and there but the motivation for movement has been lost. This is a movie purportedly about passion in which no passion can be found.

Worse perhaps than all of that, the storyline is nearly impossible to follow. The scenes seem chosen at random — shuffled by distant memory, filmed and acted just as hazily, with any sort of meaning lost along the way. The effect is rather like peering through someone else’s photo album without having any idea who the people are. Exposition is entirely missing. So are their personalities. Cecil Vyse (actor Laurence Fox) pops up, and one has no idea who he is. One has no idea why Lucy would consent to anything he asks. Therefore one is unaffected later when she changes her mind.

As for George (Rafe Spall), “he seems like a stalker,” the person watching with me kept saying. The actor’s choice of staring at Lucy repeatedly and little else, did nothing to cover the gaping holes the script left in George Emerson’s character development. Yet George should be a galvanising figure in the story - the turning point depends upon him. Spall’s George Emerson is so pallid and passive that when he kept telling Lucy “We’re alive!” in what’s meant to be a triumphant moment, I had to wonder, “You are?”

Elaine Cassidy’s Lucy seems peevish and detached throughout the film - she’d have made a better Charlotte. And Charlotte - we’re supposed to feel a bit annoyed watching Charlotte perhaps, but not because of Sophie Thompson’s acting choices. It’s hard to say whether the strange choices made by actors who have proven quite able in prior work is due to direction. All we see is what is viewable. I say viewable, because another problem with this adaptation is that most of the dialogue is nearly impossible to decipher. It isn’t the accents - it’s that the actors mumble, swallow, and whisper their dialogue to the point you want to throw something at the screen. Sophie Thompson’s Charlotte is the worst culprit of all in that regard. Perhaps it was the actor’s or director’s choice to make Charlotte’s repression so complete that she swallowed all attempts to speak. If so, a bit more art is required. We can’t follow the story if we can’t understand what she is saying. But Thompson is not the only guilty party. At times the stuttering and whispering and air-swallowing is so overdone by various actors that the film seems more like a video made of a local, amateur ‘panto’ performance of E. M. Forster’s classic.