In this gluttonous age of streaming, where art of all forms is cannibalized by the film industry in pursuit of content, the more particular art of adaptation has become all but a lost skill. Gone are the days where works of literature were made to prove enduring popularity or renown, or were vetted for their perceived adaptability, or had their rights held until a prestige director signed up to guide them toward awards glory. In fact, not only have such hurdles been largely removed from the track, but the publishing industry writ large has been remade in the wake of Hollywood’s reliance on outsourced creativity and original stories — to the degree that a sizable slice of the book industry’s production feels designed specifically with the aim of adaptation in mind. So it’s worth taking note these days when a left-field adaptation upsets the curated, seemingly assembly-line approach to literary translation and reaches the finish line, particularly when said film is made outside the studio system.
Rob Petit’s feature debut, Underland, is one such curio. Adapted and taking its title from Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 work of natural science nonfiction, Underland the film is a distinctly sensorial project, its general shape more inspired by the material spaces represented in the original text than in attempting any kind of direct interpretation. Which makes sense, as Macfarlane’s book isn’t a logical choice for the cinematic treatment — if anything, its episodic approach and emphasis on exploring the tactility and surreality of underground places would seem to lend itself better to the kind of serialized, nonfiction TV series that streaming services release with pace. Indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more surprising it becomes that the British Macfarlane’s book — the core of which concerns itself with the Jonas Salk maxim of being “good ancestors” — wasn’t instead spun up into the latest David Attenborough-narrated docu-series of bio-/eco-/climatological survey.
To that end, Petit’s Underland couldn’t be much different, condensing Macfarlane’s 500 pages into less than 80 minutes. And in some ways, this must have been a practical choice: Underland the book, subtitled A Deep Time Journey, might best be described as a eco-minded travelogue, with the author exploring various subterranean locales — from caves to catacombs, the Karst plateau to a glacier’s moulin, and even an underground laboratory seeking evidence of dark matter — and ruminating on the irreversible effects, geological and otherwise, of the Anthropocene on the planet’s past and future. A nature writer by trade, Macfarlane’s language blends poetic description of the natural world’s most hidden spaces with prose that tends toward the philosophical: “Into the Underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” Critics of the book, then, are likely to cite a certain existential ponderousness, but that particular quality, combined with the lack of a logical path for translating the text to the film medium, frees up Petit to craft a more aesthetic than expositional work, taking inspiration from and extracting the richness of the book’s various settings while largely setting aside its more discursive interests.
But while this approach allows the film to embrace a more abstracted style, it also shears off too much of the book’s thematic heft. Macfarlane’s penchant for the poetic is at least suitably matched in Petit’s roving, hypnotic belowground visuals and the film’s droning, spectral soundscape, but there are also moments where even these otherwise riveting elements can begin to feel a bit artificial when applied to otherwise purely observation footage. Perhaps that’s a byproduct of how much more narrow the director’s scope is than the author’s, and this may all ultimately be more of a semantic argument, as those unfamiliar with the source material will likely have less qualms with the admittedly captivating work that Petit delivers. Still, even viewers uninitiated with Macfarlane’s book will likely sense the film’s gossamer construction and Petit’s distrust in a purely visual art object, particularly as Sandra Hüller’s narration begins to work overtime in introducing and emphasizing the most rhetorical of Macfarlane’s text. But for those able to disassociate Underland the movie from Underland the book, Petit’s final product executes a mostly successful style-as-substance artistry and reflects a richer and more rewarding approach to both documentary filmmaking and cinematic adaptation than one is like to find much of these days.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 4.
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