The Secret Garden (1993) — the beloved Agnieszka Holland film · The Secret Garden (2020) — the recent remake with Colin Firth
It depends on your reader. The book's first third is a genuine mystery, locked doors and crying in the night, and a film will spoil every reveal, so a child who loves mysteries should read first. But this is also a long, slow book where nothing explodes, and for a reader who needs convincing that the destination is worth it, the 1993 film first is a fair trade: they lose the surprises and gain the will to get there.
The book's engine is slow time: the garden wakes up week by week, and the children wake up with it. A film has two hours, so the waiting becomes a montage, and the waiting was the medicine.
The recent remake makes the garden literally magical and ends with the manor burning. It's handsome, but it solves with spectacle what the book solves with wheelbarrows and fresh air, and that swap changes what the story means.
It's the faithful one, and it's lovely. But even it has to compress months of Colin's slow recovery into a few scenes, and small things shift, like how Mary's parents die. The shape survives; the patience doesn't.
It's the robin who shows Mary where the key is buried, and he's a full character with opinions, courtship troubles, and a nest to defend. The films keep him as set dressing; the book gives him chapters.
A boy who charms foxes, crows, and ponies, and talks to seeds. On the page he gets the time to be genuinely strange and wonderful instead of just a helpful friend.
Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, and the broad Yorkshire dialect look odd on the page for a chapter or two and then become half the warmth of the book. Mary learning to speak it is one of the quiet ways she heals.
Colin decides the garden's power is a science and runs lectures and experiments on it, half ridiculous and half profound. It's the book's whole philosophy, and no film has room for it.
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