The Birthday Party, a new film from director Miguel Ángel Jiménez, is an adaptation of a 2007 novel. I didn't know that going in, but I could tell. Though feeling literary can of course be a good thing for a movie, these two artforms excel at different things, and not every story that flourishes in one is well-suited for the other. More often than not, if I start to suspect that something I'm watching is an adaptation, it's because I'm becoming conscious of gaps – not in the narrative, but in the level of detail. It's like being aware that this particular combination of things once made sense in a way they now do not.
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