Tina Gharavi directs a new film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, with Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders among the ensemble cast. Justine Waddell wrote the screenplay.

The source novel is a peculiar, tonally elusive work. It centres on the quarterlife crisis of a headstrong, well-born young woman in Edwardian London, faced with the necessity of getting married. Waddell and Gharavi have gone creatively against the grain of the book.

Their boldest move concerns astronomy. Woolf gives it only a single glancing reference in the novel. The filmmakers amplify that into the centre of the heroine's yearning — possibly, as the Guardian's review playfully suggests, implanting a subconscious memory of Cole Porter's lyrics to the song of the same title: "You are the one, only you beneath the moon, under the sun…."

The result, according to the review, is "a wayward, unworldly fantasia, a four-leaf clover of a film – or even five-leaf; rather beautifully designed and photographed, flavoured with a wistful, unexpectedly Germanic kind of romanticism."

Gharavi, Iranian-born and a Bafta nominee, steers the material away from one of Woolf's least attractive qualities. The adaptation removes what the review calls Woolf's "supercilious condescension towards the self-betterment of newly educated lower and middle classes." In its place stands a sweet-natured story, performed with conviction by the all-star ensemble cast and interspersed with dreamlike set pieces.

This shift in emphasis changes the film's paternity. As the reviewer puts it, "The result is not precisely Virginia Woolf's Night and Day; maybe more EM Forster's Night and Day or even Ronald Firbank's Night and Day."

That verdict cuts both ways. Woolf purists may object to a version of the novel that trades her social satire for romantic fantasy. But the review welcomes the change — "thankfully, in my view" — and credits the film with finding a workable cinematic language for a book long considered resistant to adaptation.

For Gharavi, the film marks a departure into period literary territory. For Waddell, an actress turned screenwriter, it represents a high-profile commission drawn from the modernist canon. The pairing of a Bafta-nominated director with an ensemble led by Spall and Saunders signals that Woolf's lesser-known second novel — long overshadowed by Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse — is getting a bigger screen treatment than her more celebrated works have mustered in recent years.

The film's reception will test whether audiences respond to a Woolf adaptation that borrows the outlines of her plot while discarding much of her sensibility. On the evidence of this review, the gamble produces something strange, lovely and only partially Woolf's — a fantasia reaching, quite literally, for the stars.