Laura Blacklock is a journalist on a boat, the similarities end there.

The book opens with our protagonist being robbed in her own home, thus causing her to loose sleep, take anti-anxiety medications and just generally be on the edge. Understandably so, but she also ends up drinking heavily and her status as unreliable narrator is really driven home and walked through the door.

In the movie there’s no sign of this. There’s a small scene that sets up Knightley as having witnessed a drowning of a source, but no talk about medications or signs of excessive alcohol consumption. She’s a professional after all, an award winning journalist for The Guardian hand picked to come and report on this billionaires new yacht before setting up a foundation for his dying wife.

Now, the billionaire and the heiress wife with cancer might sound familiar, but everything surrounding it is new. In the book our journalist is a lower employee for Velocity magazine, only getting this gig because her boss is on maternity leave. And the cruise in the book is swapped out for a private yacht.

The changes made all contribute in making the story better. Part of what makes the book challenging (especially for a Norwegian to read) is how the facts are so wrong and descriptions are off. You wouldn’t feel the waves around you on a cruise ship when you’re docked! Has the author ever been on a cruise ship? And the water isn’t full of ice outside Bergen in mid-September. The author adding all these crazy and wrong details was the iceberg that sank her story.

Ware also describes the Norwegians as old farmers who don’t speak a lick of English. Not even the hotel staff was fluent in English, and everyone else were either danish, swedish or that good old “Scandinavian”. Just for everyone’s information: Norwegians are taught the English language in school, starting in the third grade. I think the generation of Norwegians who weren’t fluent in English died with my grandparents in the nineties. My dad – who is now 75, owns a farm and his major was English. Convinced? Ok, let’s move on.

The character Ben Howard who plays Blacklocks ex in the movie, is also the photographer on the boat. This is a separate character named “Cole” in the book. This matters in small ways, but I’m not going to spoil the entire plot or all the changes. I’ll let you have your fun discovering the differences.

Let’s just say this: The movie is definitely better than the book, because it doesn’t have all the factual errors or other descriptions that make no sense. It’s also a much more satisfying watch than read, because the book drills us over and over on “nobody believes me because I’m on anti-depressants, I haven’t slept in 5 days and I’m constantly drunk”. The movie is more confronting. Blacklock is taken seriously – as she should be – until she isn’t because there just isn’t any evidence and people turn on her.

But is the story good? In my opinion, it’s not the best, but it’s not the worst. Dare I say it feels a little too small in the movie? The adaptation of Emma Frost definitely did wonders to the story. But we also lost a large element of the excitement. And a lot of the extravagance and danger. In the book parallel to the story we’re seeing unfold, there’s a separate story of her partner and parents reporting her missing. Her clothes being found in the ocean along with a dead body. This adds to the tension and wonder of what has happened and what is going to happen. Did the story need it? Probably not, but in the book it was a big source of tension, and a pretty good one. This was one thing Ware did extremely well.

In the case of book vs movie – The movie wins this time, partly because it has a fantastic cast. The book drowned somewhere outside the Swedish archipelago, a place that was never even mentioned in the movie. But they both got to see the aurora borealis light the sky green in the end, even if Lo in the book confuses it with a sunrise.