This week in movies you missed: These days it sometimes seems like every new movie release that isn't adapted from a comic book is adapted from a young adult novel. Last week it was The Giver, from Lois Lowry's classroom standard. This week it's If I Stay.

For this trend we can thank the success of Twilight, The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars. But not every YA novel makes for a hit movie.

Case in point: Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, a seeming response to 9/11 in the form of a coming-of-age story, won solid sales and prizes when it was published in 2004. Briefly released last fall, the movie version sank without a trace.

What happened?

What You Missed
American teen Daisy (Saoirse Ronan faking a nasal accent) has been sent to rural England to live with her aunt while her (never-seen) dad is busy with his new wife and baby. She's pissed off about that, and spends the first half hour of the film showing it with incessant sulking while her adorable English cousins try to interest her in life on their adorable farm. Her aunt, meanwhile, goes to Geneva on deliberately-kept-vague political business.

Then a nuclear device explodes in London. Trees thrash, snow falls, power goes out, and martial law is declared. The "enemy" (apparently a terrorist group, but never identified) has poisoned the water supply and is roaming the countryside. Daisy has just realized she's in love with her cousin, Eddie (George MacKay), when they're ripped apart. Now she and her youngest cousin, Piper (Harley Bird), must fend for themselves in an increasingly bleak landscape.

Why You Missed It
Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play) directed this British production, which reached 68 U.S. theaters, none here. Now on Netflix and Amazon Instant.

Should You Keep Missing It?
How I Live Now inspired such strong and divergent reactions in me from moment to moment that I want to read the novel to see if the issue is the source material or the adaptation.

My 20-point, highly scientific scale for the assessment of indie films:

1-4 points: Does it look pretty?
3/4. The whole film has that yellowy Instagram look for insta-nostalgia. Being a child of the '70s, I'm fine with that.

Not so fine with the director's habit of zooming in on things he wants us to find important. That felt like an apocalyptic '70s movie in a bad way.

1-4 points: Does anything happen?
3/4. Twenty-first-century Britain is overrun with invisible enemies and turns its young men into cannon fodder, so yes. On the other hand, Ronan never changes her expression, and she's the one we're focused on, so no.

1-4 points: Does what happens make sense?
4/4. Here's what I like about How I Live Now. From Red Dawn to The Hunger Games, a lot of movies have indulged the adolescent fantasy-slash-terror of having your home become a battleground. (Hey, at least there's no more homework and probably no one to keep you from making out with that hot guy.)