In 1918, war veteran Tom Sherbourne (Fassbender) seeks solitude after his experiences in battle, and finds it in a job as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, off the coast of Tasmania. This doesn’t last long though, when he falls in love with local girl Isabel (Vikander). After a long and flirty correspondence through letters, the two marry and get on with starting a family on Janus. In some ways, Cianfrance’s films Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond The Pines feel like a lay-up for his adaptation of M.L. Stedman’s 2012 novel. Although it’s his first film to be based on a literary source, his previous films were also novelistic in their scale, each following their characters on an emotional voyage across a generation. The Light Between Oceans is more slowly paced than either of them while covering a similar breadth of story time, but it’s no less affecting for it. It also has tour-de-force performances in common with those earlier films, top-billed and unquestionably chief among which is Fassbender. He’s reliably great whether in dramas like these or less demanding blockbusters like this summer’s X-Men: Apocalypse, but here, he’s at the peak of his acting powers. Tom ostensibly escaped ‘the war to end all wars’ intact, but his intense survivor’s guilt and ceaseless nobility snakes its way through the drama to devastating effect, with the star conveying incredible depths of emotion in just a stare. The first hour of the film flies by as we get swept up in Tom and Isabel’s mutual attraction, set at first within the social confines of the harbour town where she grew up and then let off the leash once they arrive on Janus as husband and wife. Adam Arkapaw’s gorgeous cinematography gives their lonely island a timeless appeal as the couple get lost in one another. But their romantic isolationism has a downside and once the other shoe drops, the film spirals into dizzying melodrama. Rachel Weisz is introduced as a tragic character for whom life goes on outside of the little bubble in which Tom and Isabel have been living and she delivers a heart-wrenching performance as the wronged party in all of this. Weisz elicits such sympathy that the film is almost thrown completely off balance from the moment she appears. The Light Between Oceans is a tearjerker that moves just a little more jerkily the longer it goes on, but it’s bursting with sympathy for its flawed characters. It takes great pains to build up a moral dilemma into an emotionally impossible situation, and even if it were not so even-handed and mature, the sheer combined might of Fassbender, Vikander and Weisz makes it transfixing to the last moment. The Light Between Oceans is in UK cinemas now.
