Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See Starts Strong Before Crumbling Under Its Own Weighty Story
Photo courtesy of Netflix
Editor’s Note: This review originally published September 15th, 2023 out of Toronto International Film Festival.
I was initially planning to write a review of All the Light We Cannot See, directed by Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) and written by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), based on the world premiere of the first two episodes at the Toronto International Film Festival. I left the premiere screening highly impressed and excited to see what would happen next. Imagine my surprise, then, to read the first reviews of the Netflix miniseries, which have been mostly negative.
There are two commonalities amongst all these negative reviews: they came from critics who had read and loved the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Anthony Doerr (I have not read it), and they came from critics who had watched screeners of all four episodes (I didn’t know they were available, given my plans to review based around the TIFF screenings). On that first count, I’m happy to offer a different perspective. On the second, however, I didn’t want to be missing the full experience, so I sought access to the screeners, and I can now confess that I generally like the miniseries, though I like it less than I did when I was just halfway through.
To broadly summarize the show, it follows two characters in Nazi-occupied France whose paths intersect during the Battle of Saint-Malo in 1944: Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Aria Mia Loberti), a blind French girl helping the resistance through coded messages in radio broadcasts, and Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann), a reluctant Nazi soldier who’s an expert on radio technology and has been listening to Marie-Laure’s broadcasts. The series jumps between the two leads’ perspectives and different time periods through non-linear storytelling.
The material concerning Marie-Laure and Werner’s childhoods is the most interesting (the younger Marie-Laure and Werner are played by Nell Sutton and Lucas Herzog, respectively). Marie-Laure’s father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo) works at the French National Museum of Natural History, and the LeBlanc family must attempt to preserve the light of culture against the onslaught of fascism—as well as specifically protecting a valuable, possibly magical or cursed jewel because the Nazis are an awfully superstitious bunch who want such a thing. Werner, meanwhile, is an orphan who figured out how to bypass the Nazis’ restrictions on foreign radio signals and as a result is forced into working for the Nazis to avoid punishment. The scenes of him at the National Political Institute of Education are a chilling representation of the violence of indoctrination.