Synopsis
A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.
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Cast
- Michael FassbenderTom Sherbourne
- Alicia VikanderIsabel Sherbourne
- Rachel WeiszHannah Roennfeldt
- Bryan BrownSeptimus Potts
- Jack ThompsonRalph Addicott
- Caren PistoriusAdult Lucy-Grace
- Florence CleryLucy-Grace
- Anthony HayesSergeant Vernon Knuckey
- Emily BarclayGwen Potts
- Leon FordFrank Roennfeldt
Recommendations
- 75
IndieWire
This is a widescreen ode to the beauty of absolution, told with such constant sincerity that you can’t help but want to forgive its flaws. - 75
Slant Magazine
Derek Cianfrance's film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis. - 63
Charlotte Observer
Writer-director Derek Cianfrance knew he was dealing with a story full of coincidences when he adapted M.L. Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans, so he avoided melodrama by holding himself and his excellent actors in check. The result is a movie that crackles quietly without flaring up into an emotional blaze. - 63
Movie Nation
It’s a romance novel, a romantic fable, brought to life by a pretty good cast that cannot make it more than is, that cannot give it more meaning and make it less frustrating than novelist M.L. Stedman intended. - 60
Variety
The Light Between Oceans winds up taking one too many self-serious twists and turns. The film earns its darkness, but it might have been even more affecting if it didn’t shrink from the light. - 58
The Playlist
A lovely, but uneven moral tale of love, forgiveness and heartrending misdeeds, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans is conceptually sound, and at times, beautifully gut-wrenching. But the plaintive picture often becomes engrossed in conveying at all times just how precious life and love is. - 55
TheWrap
It’s a grand, old-school saga full of sacrifice and betrayal and loss, and just when the audience is gearing up for a powerfully tragic resolution of the kind that Thomas Hardy might have written, the movie veers off into Nicholas Sparks territory instead. - 50
Chicago Sun-Times
A gorgeous but plodding and borderline ludicrous period-piece weeper.
