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As movie adaptations go, in my Father's Den wears its literary heart on its sleeve. Based on Maurice Gee's 1972 novel of the same name, the film begins with the poetic voice-over of a teenage girl, later seen lying, as if in a coffin, along a railway track: "One day in a town at the end of the world, the tide went out and never returned." But as we get to know the soon-to-disappear Celia (Emily Barclay), whose relationship with a returned war photographer (Matthew Macfadyen) the movie charts, the film's biggest surprise is how far it strays from the book. Neither Celia's poem, the lunar landscape of Central Otago, or indeed the war photographer exists in the novel. For lovers of Gee's taut prose (they include New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who last month honored the author with an Award for Literary Achievement), the real mystery of this crime story might well be: where's the book?

It's 32 years since In My Father's Den became a Kiwi classic. The book's cool, ironic narrator Paul Prior, an English teacher rebelling against his religious upbringing, embodied the tough outsider of New Zealand literature, starting with John Mulgan's 1939 novel Man Alone. When Gee began writing the book in the late '60s, "we were able to shake off that oppressive Puritanism," the author, 73, recalls, "which wasn't only religious, it was secular." Novels like Gee's award-winning Plumb (1978), based on the life of his Presbyterian minister turned Communist grandfather James Chapple, continued that shaking-off. By the time writer-director Brad McGann got around to adapting Den three decades later, New Zealand had changed.

Gone were the beloved creeks and orchards of Gee's west Auckland, and the religious fervor which he saw as polluting this innocent age. For first-time feature director McGann, 40, the process of bringing Celia and Paul into the present day was reminiscent of the drawing exercises he did as a kid at school; taking someone else's squiggle and turning it around into something new. "I needed to find my own voice," he says.

That McGann did - not just flipping the action to New Zealand's South Island, whose dark, claustrophobic peaks he thought best reflected the story's mood, but ending the film where the book begins: uncovering the body of a murdered schoolgirl. Instead, the film is concerned with a different kind of discovery: what happens when a man returns home after 17 years abroad to find an old girlfriend (Jodie Rimmer) whose wildly imaginative daughter might just be his. In this sense, McGann remains true to the book: In My Father's Den is about the sexual charge that can dance between men and their daughters (or would-be daughters), superbly captured in a scene where Celia interviews Paul for a class assignment and both flirt in different ways with the truth.

McGann toys just as nimbly with the novelist's narrative. "Brad made it his story," acknowledges Gee. Even still, "the bones of my story keep breaking through." These can still be traced through the melodramatic subplot of Paul's devout, disapproving brother (Colin Moy) and his repressed wife (Miranda Otto). But they find a fuller expression in the expanded use of the secret study of the film's title. It's this room, tucked behind the poison shed in an old orchard, where Celia and Paul can retreat into the world of books. But it's also where the sins of the father must return.

Gee has found in McGann a perfect celluloid soul mate to explore these shadowlands. With Possum, his award-winning 1996 short, the filmmaker, trained at Melbourne's Swinburne school, found improbable lightness in the dark fable of a boy and his autistic sister at the turn of last century. With Father's Den, he sets a match to New Zealand's "cinema of unease," the phrase coined by Sam Neill to describe the country's love affair with darkness. "I need a cigarette to cope with this kind of scenery," says Paul at one point. So, too, might audience-goers, so slowly and inexorably are they pulled into McGann's web of darkness - and light. For in the sparky figure of Celia, we are left with a figure of unlikely hope.

And a salient lesson in adapting books for film. In an age when words can be too slavishly followed on screen, In My Father's Den is neither better nor worse than the novel, but in every sense equal to it. It's a case of a filmmaker traveling far to get close to a literary classic.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• A classic New Zealand novel dances onto the big screen, its plot transformed but its power undiluted