Rosamund Pilcher's "Winter Solstice is a long, finely-crafted romantic novel of great subtlety and style. To reduce it to a two hour movie was a challenge utterly beyond this production. The plot is changed wholly uneccesarily and what is left is a film in which the characters are cyphers and the events arbitrary and often cringe-making. The acting is truly appalling though one sympathises with the cast as they were given a script so banal that any semblance of reality must have been impossible to create. The scenery is nice and the canine actor playing Horace the dog barked well. Read the book, avoid the movie.