I've always found it mystifying that Thomas Hardy isn't adapted as often as, say, Dickens or Austen, because his great novels have intensely cinematic qualities.

Yet it's been almost 40 years since the last film version of his most vibrant tale, with Julie Christie as the spirited Bathsheba Everdene. Maybe filmmakers simply thought it couldn't be matched.

It could. Just as Ang Lee cast a foreigner's eye on the Regency England of Sense And Sensibility and absolutely captured its essence, so Danish director Thomas Vinterberg has strolled into Hardy's Victorian world and nailed what makes the writer's fiction so intoxicating. The result is an epic romance.

Key to its success is the casting of the central role; not only is the luminous Christie a hard act to follow, but Bathsheba is one of the richest heroines in English literature. Carey Mulligan proves equal to the task, however, embodying Bathsheba's contradiction: fiercely independent at a time when women were meant to be subservient, yet with a wilfulness, even arrogance that places her in the centre of an impossible love quadrangle that only tragedy and time will fix.

The film opens with the only incidence of voiceover, as Bathsheba describes her status, as an orphan in the care of relatives, and her temperament. "I'm accustomed to being on my own. Some say too accustomed, too independent." And then she climbs onto her horse in a fetching, scarlet leather tunic, adjusts her seating position from female to male and gallops across the fields.

Shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) is appropriately thrilled. It's notable that Vinterberg also introduces Oak in his pre-credits sequence; Bathsheba may have two other suitors, but this adaptation acknowledges what any reader or viewer knows instantly and wills on - the true romance between her and Oak.

Men in this world don't beat about the bush with proposals of marriage. When Oak pops the question, it's too soon for Bathsheba to be hitching herself to a man. Soon afterwards their fortunes are reversed. He loses his livelihood - in one of the most breathtakingly cruel scenes Hardy devised - just as she inherits a bustling farm, and the suitor becomes the employee.

Step in wealthy neighbour William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), though he too exercises too much haste. Ironically, the least deserving of all, the dashing scoundrel Sergeant Troy (Tom Sturridge), breaks through Bathsheba's defenses by first offering her what the others were too civil to contemplate: sex.

The famous seduction scene in "the hollow in the ferns" is the point when this strong, smart woman loses her way. It's beautifully conceived and shot here, particularly after Troy has completed his display of swordplay and takes his prize, a kiss - accompanied here by a highly sexual gesture, an expression on Mulligan's face that tells us that Bathsheba's world view has shifted dramatically, and the exquisite shot of her, now alone, bathed in deep blue light amongst the trees.

This scene aside, Sturridge is the film's only weak link. His Troy seems too callow, a spoilt child compared to the terrifically virile cad presented by Terence Stamp in the earlier film. In contrast, Sheen gives a terribly moving portrait of loneliness and mental decline, and Schoenaerts is a manly and comradely Oak.

Along with the performances, David Nicholls's script feels fresh and contemporary, and funny too. And in cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen's gorgeously lit scenes, Vinterburg evokes a persuasive rural community, in which song and dance play a frequent role and the true connection between Bathsheba and her eventual partner can be seen in their unspoken bond in the heart of nature.