Review: The Light Between Oceans

Rapture gives way to moral anguish in Derek Cianfrance's third feature, The Light Between Oceans, an achingly beautiful adaptation of M.L. Stedman's 2012 tearjerker.

Marrying David Lean-esque imagery to a chamber piece that would not have been out of place in Ingmar Bergman's oeuvre, the film begins with Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) hoping to cauterise the trauma he experienced during the first World War by taking on the job of a lighthouse keeper on the remote island of Janus. Isolation, even on such a picturesque location, can erode even the most mentally stable yet it is not the retreat into solitude that will prove Tom's undoing but rather his re-awakening to life courtesy of the radiant and spirited Isabel (Alicia Vikander).

Isabel, who has lost her two brothers in the war, has an understanding of his pain and, as their attraction blossoms, she urges him to take her to Janus. When he protests that only the wives of the lighthouse keepers are allowed on the island, she replies, "Then marry me." The ferocity of determination on Vikander's face expresses Isabel's incredible will and, though Tom laughs off her proposal, we know it's only a matter of time before Isabel claims her victory. Indeed, the two soon marry and immerse themselves into an impossibly blissful life. And then come the miscarriages.

"You're still a mother...even when you've lost a child," she tells Tom early in their courtship, and it's almost an understatement to state how magnificently Vikander transforms into a ravaged shell as Isabel's obsession with having a child consumes her entire being. The scene in which she realises that she's about to lose another child and cannot do anything to stop it is almost too much to bear, so raw and painful are Vikander's grief and Fassbender's desperation to witness. So how both comforting and cruel it is when a rowboat containing a dead man and a crying baby wash up on shore. Tom is compelled to do his duty - he must send word to town and note the incident in the logs - but Isabel, exultant that her prayers have been answered, pleads with him to keep silent. No one will ever know that the baby isn't there, she says.

Decisions are often made before we even acknowledge or are aware of them, and The Light Between Oceans is replete with such moments when the heart has already forged its own path before the head stirs to consciousness. In the same way Tom laughs off Isabel's proposal during the early days of their courtship though one can almost see his heart swell at the prospect of making that proposal come true, so too is it evident that Tom will not deny Isabel her plea. The actual decision may come a day later, but it was already made when he observed how the mere presence of the child has revived Isabel. That doesn't mean that Tom is any less torn - that shaky breath Fassbender emits as what little resolve he has crumbles is heartbreaking - and his awareness that their happiness is on borrowed time is ever more increased when he learns of Hannah (Rachel Weisz), a woman on the mainland who is still grieving over the loss of her husband and baby daughter who were lost to the sea two years ago.

It's a tremendously agonising situation, one where all parties are both in the right and in the wrong, and Cianfrance treats the Solomonic situations with a clarity and confidence that allow you to overlook the strangely rushed final fifteen minutes. Yes, it can be overly sentimental and more than a touch manipulative, but there's a purity in its emotions that makes the tears well-earned. The lead trio do superb, sublime and haunting work and Adam Arkapaw captures the suffering in a series of ravishing images.

The Light Between Oceans

Directed by: Derek Cianfrance

Written by: Derek Cianfrance; based on the novel by M.L. Stedman

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Jack Thompson, Florence Clery, Thomas Unger, Bryan Brown