Introducing his new film, The Room Next Door, before its screening at the New York Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar took a moment to express his gratitude to Sigrid Nunez, the author of the novel What Are You Going Through, on which the film is based. “Sigrid,” he intoned with comic despair, “I have been unfaithful to you.”

But when it comes to a film adaptation, is there a distinction between love and fidelity? And, if so, which is more important in the end? Two very different adaptations of Nunez’s novels—Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, based on the novel of the same name and now released for a general audience in the United States—demonstrate both the risks and rewards of translating the written word to the screen. They also show that a loving adaptation of a particular work doesn’t necessarily have to be a faithful one, and that obsessive, nitpicking fidelity can miss out on the ineffable essence of the text. It’s the same as with loving a person: You can know the facts of their life, even delve into details not previously known, but never really understand who they are.

There’s no mistaking The Room Next Door for a by-the-numbers version of What Are You Going Through. While it follows the novel’s main events, the film dramatically plays with its pacing, doing away with the book’s whole first act, in which we slowly get to know a first-person narrator as she visits a “very dear old friend whom [she] had not seen in years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, [she] might not see again.” We come to know this narrator not through what she tells us directly about her own life or work but rather through her sensitive digressions on the lives and work of others: an elderly neighbor, her friend’s past life, the modernist Dora Carrington, an Austrian documentary about faith, a rescued cat.

There are other differences as well. Nunez’s narrator and her friend are nameless, but in Almodóvar’s film the two have names: Ingrid and Martha. They also have very famous faces: those of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. Moore’s Ingrid is not to be confused with Nunez’s narrator; she is a woman facing some of the same circumstances, but she is her own character. The movie starts about 100 pages into the novel, when the dying Martha asks Ingrid for help in ending her life, and in lieu of developing the sparse backstories that Nunez hints at, Almodóvar uses the novel as an emotional template to start mixing his own palette, quite literally. While the novel deals more with the narrator’s inner life than her outer one, The Room Next Door emphasizes the opposition between Ingrid and Martha visually, making material what are more spiritual and emotional differences in the book. In a set of jarring but gorgeous contrasts between Ingrid’s vivid, jewel-toned wardrobe and Martha’s pallor, which indicates a previously vibrant life now drained of color, we are told the story not only through dialogue and flashbacks but also through the bold colors and almost palpable textures that tend to define an Almodóvar film. By dispensing with the novel’s first half—in which we gain so much insight into Nunez’s version of the character and how she functions—Almodóvar frees himself from the burden of fidelity, announcing that the film is simply not the book. The difference in title also makes this clear: Sigrid Nunez wrote What Are You Going Through, while Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed The Room Next Door.

At the start of the movie, when Martha makes her request, we see the two women out for the evening. Martha begins the outing with an optimistic coat of lipstick that fades as the night goes on, while Ingrid’s dark red lipstick stays deep and lush. Similarly, when we see Martha in her bold, fantastically designed apartment early on, she seems out of place in it, a figure drawn in modest monochrome and dropped into an intensely colored world to which she no longer belongs.

This translation to the visual is also used to great effect to wordlessly depict the essential inwardness of Nunez’s novel. The immediate temptation while adapting a first-person narrative like What Are You Going Through is surely to retain the narrative “I” through voice-over, always a tricky proposition. Here, simply shunting the work of revelation onto Moore might have run the risk of betraying the narrator’s peculiar reticence; in Nunez’s novel, we often learn the most about her through what she chooses not to tell us, and through her openness to others rather than her assertion of a self. In the film, we watch as Martha and Ingrid spend more time together and come to terms, together and separately, with what must happen. We begin to see Ingrid’s vibrance once again infuse Martha’s style, bringing her back to her own boldly colored life as she approaches death—a dramatic change from what happens between these two in the book. What we get is a film that pays homage to the ideas that undergird What Are You Going Through while also interpreting the text with fearless abandon through images, colors, and textures as well as words.

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If The Room Next Door takes liberties with plot and character, it also manages to carry off the critical Nunez reader and transform them into a rapt Almodóvar viewer. The Friend, however, offers a very different experience. I found myself doing what I try to avoid when watching a film adaptation: comparing it at every point to the novel. And that is because The Friend’s fidelity to the novel is so smugly completist—so sure that it has an answer to all of the text’s original open questions and vacancies—that it practically begs you to do so.

A large part of the problem is due to a genre mismatch. While McGehee and Siegel remain faithful to the novel, which centers on the relationship between a woman and the dog she acquires under unhappy circumstances, they also try to turn Nunez’s spare and poignant philosophizing into a witty New York rom-com: When Fido Met Sally or You’ve Got a Giant Dog. Word for word, their script may be more loyal to the novel than Almodóvar’s, but unlike him, they fail to capture the ineffably subtle tones between tragedy and comedy that Nunez so often paints in.

As with the novel, the film tells the story of a curious romance: between Iris (Naomi Watts) and Apollo, the depressed Harlequin Great Dane that she inherits after the suicide of her mentor and best friend, Walter (Bill Murray). Woman and dog butt heads as they compete to out-mourn each other before eventually finding solace in their shared loss. Soon, a deeper relationship blossoms.

The challenges to their interspecies romance abound. The first, of course, is Iris’s initial non-dog-savviness (many small-lady/large-dog high jinks ensue); another is that the building where she has a rent-stabilized studio apartment doesn’t allow dogs. Unnecessary new B-plots and backstories, such as Iris’s stalled novel and her decision to put her own work aside in order to edit Walter’s, occasionally bob around the surface of the film.

In Nunez’s novel, this odd-couple premise widens into a tender, funny, deeply melancholic exploration of how and why we mourn, what animals feel, and how all of us communicate these experiences (or fail to do so). McGehee and Siegel, however, try to fill in all of the novel’s graceful or provocative blank spots with explanatory detail, the kind that conventionally makes for nuanced, sympathetic characters.

While it’s a simple and understandable mistake—attempting to fit The Friend into comfortable generic boundaries—the novel’s true genius is its refusal to do so. In trying to squeeze Nunez’s book into the parameters of a touching dramedy, the directors have crammed in unnecessary details designed to let us know the characters better. Through a series of flashbacks and expository introductions, we learn that Walter left behind not only an aging, depressed Great Dane but an estranged manic-pixie Gen Z daughter, an endless and indulgent collected-letters project, and a parade of parodically selfish wives. What this approach fails to recognize is that the gaps between what is said and unsaid in the novel, along with its seeming digressions into the narrator’s personal research and viewing habits (so very different from her on-screen counterpart’s), are what give Nunez’s book its edge of essential and irreconcilable sadness, which lasts even after woman and dog have fallen for each other.

Even the choice of the name Iris for Watts’s character (as usual, Nunez’s narrator remains anonymous) seems forced. The name appears elsewhere in the author’s work; in The Vulnerables, the book that forms an unconventional trilogy with The Friend and What Are You Going Through, the secondary character who sparks the main events of the plot is a younger, wealthy white woman named Iris (we eventually learn that she’s the type of person who would tell people she adopted an animal, when in fact it came from an expensive breeder). Perhaps I’d read too much of the novelist’s biography into her narrators, assuming that when Nunez—who is 73 years old and of Chinese-Panamanian descent—was writing about her human protagonist in The Friend, she was not necessarily writing about a white woman in her early 50s but a woman who was older and, if not half-Chinese and half-Panamanian, at least not white. In the books, we are never told what the woman looks like, or how old she is or how much money she has, just that she is in proximity to people with wealth. Yet rereading them, I became newly convinced of what she is not: not white, not young, not rich. This is more evident in The Vulnerables, which is more overtly concerned with class difference than The Friend, as the narrator recalls her distant youth in an underserved neighborhood, a stark contrast to Iris’s multimillion-dollar condo.

But either way, I was struck by how far the Iris of the film felt from the narrator in Nunez’s novel. The Iris of McGehee and Siegel’s adaptation is most certainly not the Iris of The Vulnerables, but she is at times more reminiscent of that character than she is of Nunez’s actual narrator; there is a vast difference between attractive middle age and the new phase of life that begins with old age, just as there is a difference between seeing a middle-class white woman being constantly asked to bear the burden of others and a middle-class non-white woman, perhaps slightly older and in a more advanced stage of her life, being asked to do the same. Watts’s Iris is a brittle pushover who slowly learns to stand up for herself, while Nunez’s narrator simply takes things as they come, rolling her eyes but generally unfazed.

Which is not to say that Watts does a bad job here—far from it. The Friend is a perfectly charming, intermittently thoughtful holiday-adjacent movie about a woman and a dog and the dead friend who has forced them together. The chemistry between Watts and Bing, the exceptional Great Dane who plays Apollo, is, I have to confess, sweetly romantic. But unfortunately, Bing’s extraordinary charisma is part of the problem. Almost every time he made a move, the audience cooed in delight or sympathy. “This is not what the novel is about,” I wanted to shout, “but damn it, he’s so cute!”

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a book about a writer and an animal encountering death apart and then together. The Friend by Scott McGehee and David Siegel is a film about an extremely attractive woman and an extremely handsome dog learning to live together and love each other. Early on, there’s a dismissive mention of the Richard Gere/adorable Akita vehicle Hachi: A Dog’s Tale; not an hour later, the film can’t resist including a couple of gratuitous golden-hour dog-park shots that would fit in an Iams commercial. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) I realize this makes me sound like the kind of peevish viewer who, pushing her glasses up her nose, unfairly condemns the film for not looking like she had imagined it would. That’s not it exactly, though: It wasn’t how I thought it would feel.

When compared with some of The Friend’s excesses, there is something unutterably tender about the respect that Almodóvar demonstrates toward the novel that inspired his film. He shows his fidelity to the text in big, abstract ways and in minuscule details, rather than with anything so obvious as a literal-minded dedication to the plot. Verisimilitude, as always with Almodóvar, is not the point of cinema. Never mind that the people who populate the town in upstate New York where much of the film takes place all have incongruous Castilian accents. Embrace the fact that this very dialogue-heavy movie sometimes has the clean-cut didacticism of a morality play or, for that matter, one by Bertolt Brecht. Who cares that Ingrid and Martha are always dressed spectacularly to go about their unglamorous lives as a novelist and war correspondent, respectively, and inhabit homes so boldly, extravagantly fabulous that they could only be in an Almodóvar production? There is indeed no doubt that this is an Almodóvar film, and he brings all the hallmarks of his flamboyant style to it, but it shares the novel’s most quietly urgent questions about life, love, and how far empathy can go.

Where Nunez’s idiosyncratic style seems to make McGehee and Siegel uncertain whether their film should be a drama about the aftermath of suicide, an odd-couple rom-com, or just a movie about a dog, it only emboldens Almodóvar to embrace his own idiosyncrasies. Choosing to go all in with his favorite genres—melodrama and suspense—he ratchets up the sense of urgency that is central to his protagonists’ situation. From the very beginning, the relationship between Ingrid and Martha is literally framed with vibrating uncertainty; when they’re reunited in Martha’s hospital room after a long separation at the beginning of the film, we see the two women in a dramatically canted angle that brings with it a touch of soap-opera melodrama and a touch of Third Man–style noir. This is a surprisingly harmonious match for Nunez: Rereading the novel, I realized I’d forgotten that its stories of the narrator’s “real” interactions were interspersed with her account of a bad mystery novel she keeps encountering. “Anyway,” she muses toward the end, “don’t they say that every good story is a suspense story?” And what greater, most quotidian site of suspense is there than the cusp between life and death?

So which is more important, love or fidelity? I won’t dare to answer this question for any of my readers with regard to relationships, but when it comes to adaptations, it is quite clear. Adaptation is richer and more complex when it has the feeling of a past love, one you can look back on with a certain distance. Love you’re in the middle of is too obsessive, too striving, too “Am I getting this right?” There are many parts of What Are You Going Through that didn’t make it to the screen, including one of my favorite chapters, in which the narrator may or may not be hearing the unbearably moving inner monologue of an adopted cat. Halfway through the novel, the narrator pauses for a beat right before its biggest plot point is unveiled to consider the words of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, a totemic figure in much of Nunez’s work:

What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?

“What is your torment?” certainly does hit much harder, and it’s a question that resonates throughout both the novel and the film. After seeing the movie, I began to look at What Are You Going Through as a short anthology of how people suffer rather than as a single story; in being unfaithful to the novel, Almodóvar revealed a hidden truth about it.

In several of her books, Nunez has a tic of withholding identification or relevant facts, instead describing objects or situations before finally naming them. The first line of The Vulnerables quotes a novel that most people won’t realize is Virginia Woolf’s The Years until Nunez reveals it a few pages later. In What Are You Going Through, the narrator goes to see “a man” give a talk; it’s only made clear some 20 pages later that he is her ex.

This forced defamiliarization can have a jarringly poignant effect: It can make you unsure of what you know, make you wonder what you recognize. One could make the same argument about The Room Next Door. Unlike The Friend, where you are always aware of the original novel and oddly disappointed when lines from it appear, one does not need to be familiar with Nunez’s book or even know that the film is Almodóvar’s take on it. An act of loving adaptation like this allows both director and audience some space from the text in order, paradoxically, to get closer to it, as when two people who once loved the same person come together and create a composite portrait from their intimate memories, some surprising to the other or headshakingly familiar, some also heart-stopping.