Charlotte Regan’s film and Mikaela Loach’s book seem, as so often, rather different kinds of thing, put together here, by, as Sting has it, the sacred geometry of chance. A quirky magic-realist film about a bereaved 12-year-old meeting her hitherto unknown father, and a young woman in her twenties issuing an impassioned call to climate activism… Mmmm…

We meet Georgie after the death of her mum, ticking off the stages of grief, from a list which a counsellor has presumably given her. She’s living by herself, and coping well: looking after the house, and pretending to ‘the social’ that her uncle is living with her – even to the extent of recording shopkeepers saying things like ‘Georgie’s doing very well at school, thanks’, which she can then play back over the phone to reassure relatives and the authorities. We also learn bit by bit that the padlocked room she sometimes goes into is where she is building a tower from old junk, to find her mum – who had said she was going into the sky. Then this bloke turns up who claims to be her dad. And the spiders in her house talk to each other in funny voices.

How they are related

Two young women, both grieving – one for her mother, one for mother earth? Well, perhaps. Certainly both show impressive energy and oomph – as in fact Tokarczuk’s Janina in Drive your Plow.

Georgie turns out to be in need of rescue – her grief and isolation are taking her into bad futures – and her ‘dad’ turns out to be, in fact, her dad; the film shows the two of them accepting each other and forming a familial bond. We are left in hope for them both. Does Mikaela need rescue? She is certainly confronting the bad futures of our planet, and in her grief about the climate emergency tries hard to give us hope…

Yet they are so different: Georgie poor, on a council estate nicking bikes, and Mikaela with oodles of (acknowledged) privilege. The latter has the time to confront the bigger issues…