[1][2] Set on the east coast in northern Scotland, it traces an alien who, manifesting in human form, drives around the countryside picking up male hitchhikers whom she drugs and delivers to her home planet.

Gradually, it is revealed she is an alien, originally somewhere between a fox and primate in form, who has been surgically altered to look like a human woman, thus suffering constant pains.

Sometimes she admires wandering sheep, as they remind her of children at home and she considers the non-bipeds anthropomorphic because they share traits with her own species.

Later, when visiting the pens where the captives are fattened, one writes "mercy" in the dirt in front of Isserly and Amlis Vess.

After he departs to their home world to share with their people what he had witnessed (the beauty of Earth, the treatment of vodsel), Isserley's attitude changes.

She is forced to pick up one last hitchhiker, a man who insists on needing a ride to see his girlfriend give birth and mentions reincarnation on the way.

Its themes include sexism, big business, factory farming, animal cruelty and experimentation, environmental decay, class politics, rape, and treatment of and attitudes toward immigrants.

The work also challenges the idea of an objective humanity, the balance between darkness/pessimism and optimism/transcendence, and the treatment of unsuccessful members of society (unemployed, unattractive, dysfunctional, marginalized) and their roles.

However, they wrote, "finally, having utterly convinced us of his alien narrator and persuaded us to go along for the ride for nearly 300 pages, Faber doesn't quite know where to go: the miniaturist aims at a big metaphysical moment.

[5][6] "It's interesting to see the aspects of Isserley and her experience that Glazer retained, those he left behind, and those that perhaps remain as echoes," writes author Maureen Foster in a book about the film.