The Summer Book: film adaptation of Tove Jansson’s much-loved novel

Tove Jansson is best known for the Moomins – “the melancholy hippo-like creatures” now seen everywhere from mugs to baseball caps, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. But the Finnish writer also published books for adults. Her 1972 novel “The Summer Book” is a modern classic in Scandinavia, and became a cult hit elsewhere after being reissued in English in 2003. Now, it has been adapted for the screen.

Directed by Charlie McDowell (son of Malcolm), this “atmospheric film” will transport you to the “breezy calm of a small island in the Gulf of Finland”, where earnest eight-year-old Sophia (Emily Matthews) is spending the summer after her mother’s death. For company, she has her artist grandmother (Glenn Close) – a “placid powerhouse of twinkling wisdom” – and her grieving, distant father (Anders Danielsen Lie).

Not much happens and, at times, the story feels “pathologically benign”. But it is “beautifully photographed... all sunsets and wildflowers, knitwear and moss”. There are “strong performances at either end of the age spectrum”, said Jenny McCartney in The Sunday Times but the “necessary sense of Finnish originality” and “oddity” has been lost. The pace is slow, the score is “overly insistent” and the visual metaphors – repeated shots of dying pipe-tobacco embers, and a sapling being held up – are “heavy-handed”.

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Still, the element that is central to Jansson’s book – the natural world – is beautifully observed, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Gradually, the father emerges from his own grief to help his daughter, while the grandmother makes peace with the fact that the last season of her own life is almost at a close. It is a “muted but moving picture”.