2023 Show
Steven Knight · United States of America · English
A stunning adaptation whose decent performances can’t hold up the novel’s striking prose
With the source material being a Pulitzer winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See had high expectations. Plenty of what made the novel great was its straightforward prose, as well as its back-and-forth timeline, where each scene is arranged not by chronological order, but by the thematic logic that informs the characters’ actions. The new Netflix adaptation keeps the novel’s structure, however, the novel’s poetry is lost as the metaphors are shortened to its most cliché versions, and the showrunners couldn’t trust that the viewers would acknowledge the novel’s subtleties. While the cast does what it can, the show just feels like a missed opportunity to tell an excellent story.
A blind French girl and a young German soldier's paths collide during WWII.
In the coastal town of Saint-Malo, in the 1940s, blind French teenager Marie-Laure reads old classics through a radio broadcast. German soldier Werner, forced to join the Nazis, secretly listens to the broadcast, despite army regulations. Their paths collide in occupied France, as they try to survive the war.
All The Light We Cannot See has its flaws as an adaptation, as plenty of the intricacies in the original novel has been lost from the show’s 4-hour runtime. However, the show did a great job in its casting, especially with its two leads. German actor Louis Hofmann was great as Werner Pfennig, the reluctant German teenager whose technological skill dooms him to service in the Nazi forces. However, it’s newcomer Aria Mia Loberti that steals the show, even from acting veterans like Hugh Laurie and Mark Ruffalo. Like her character Marie-Laure, she is legally blind, but she also has the same wide-eyed innocence that makes her hope feel believable.
As a book fan, it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t AS GOOD as the novel.
Golden Globes
1 nom
DGA
1 nom
Spirit Awards
1 nom
Isabella Endrinal is a curator at A Good Movie to Watch. She's now free from the corporate night shift. Previous articles have been published in outlets such as NANG Magazine. She's currently catching up on some classic films… if she isn't coping with the fact that the Haikyu anime will end soon.
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