The filmmakers labor a reason for the poisoning of the family in the past, explicitly inferring abuse by the father and suggesting it was all an act of self-defense by his daughter. The now victimized Merricat is almost completely robbed of her personal agency. There seems to be an active attempt here to flesh out the mysterious unearthly tone of the book, making it all appear mundane and boring. There's a couple of standout sequences from the novel that I thought they handled really well, but ultimately it takes what's subtle about the story and makes it obvious, and takes what's obvious about the story and buries it under uninspired dramatization. I absolutely love Jackson's dark comedic masterpiece which this is based on, so even though it's never really a good idea to see an adaptation of a book you adore, I watched this anyway.
It's interesting that a female filmmaker has done so much to take the inherent dark power away from the female characters and decided instead to victimize them. It's strange when the biggest change you make in adapting a novel to the screen is to add lots of physical violence against the female characters (even a backstory of abuse that's not stated in the source material).
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