Netflix has a proven track records of making streaming hits based on novels. Loads of its most popular titles originally appeared in the pages of books, most recently action thriller The Gray Man, featuring Ryan Gosling, and director Andrew Dominik’s Blonde – which caused controversy when it was released last month (side note: much of the criticisms stemmed from the assumption the Netflix had made a biopic, instead of the dramatisation of a novel that it actually was).
Latest to capture our imaginations has been Luckiest Girl Alive, featuring Mila Kunis as protagonist Ani Fanelli and based on a 2015 novel by author Jessica Knoll. As many who read the books have attested, it was a bona fide page turner when it was published, and the general consensus among readers-turned-armchair-critics is that Netflix has done a pretty good job at capturing the complexities and darkness of Ani’s experiences as school shooting and rape survivor, within the limitations of visual media and time constraints. There’s a reason those of us who’ve read a story before it hits the screen will stubbornly maintain that ‘the books were better’, and it’s that there’s really nothing that can set the scene, endear the characters and build atmosphere quite as well as the written word.
But aside from all that – and the fact that some on social media have argued that the film should have come with a trigger warning owing to its graphic depictions of various traumas – there’s a lot about the actual plot that has been changed in the adaptation from novel to film. [WARNING: SPOILERS from here on out!]
For a start, in the original books Ani didn’t need to be convinced by her friends and fiancé to take part in the documentary about the shooting; we knew that she wanted to get her version of events out there and clear her name, but of what, it was unclear.
There are various other discrepancies between the book and the film, most notably that the architect of the school shooting, Ben, had been unknown to Ani during her time at school, and that the protagonist had been generally more complex, with a troubled backstory, than we saw in the film, purely thanks to the pages and pages dedicated to her construction.
In the films, we saw Ani call off her engagement to preppy WASP Luke (why are they always called Luke?) after admitting she was ‘using him’ to create the illusion of security and ultimately refuse to take part in the documentary, choosing instead to take control of her narrative by writing an essay for The New York Times, going onto land a full time job there.
In the book, there was no essay for the New York Times, but Jessica Knoll, who also wrote the screenplay, said the revised ending was ‘very meta’ in that it mirrored her own experiences in the aftermath to the novel, and her own personal essay detailing her own sexual assault, published in US Journal Lenny Letter in 2018.
‘When Mila came on, there were several conversations about how the ending wasn't quite landing,’ she told Entertainment Weekly.
‘At some point I do remember saying how when I wrote my essay for Lenny Letter that I was just inundated with messages from women sharing their stories, and that unlocked something in us where we were like, “Maybe there's a way to use that to shape our ending.”
‘It's very meta that it's a fictional story, a fictional character, but there are even more elements that are inspired by my real life. I like that we looked at the year that followed me writing the book and writing my essay, and the reaction to it and going on a TV show to talk about it. I liked that we embedded that into the movie because I think it makes for a more epic journey that Ani goes on.’