Is there nothing Steven Knight can’t do? Barely a year after bringing Peaky Blinders to a triumphant close, he has penned a Charles Dickens adaptation (Great Expectations), an upcoming Eighties musical drama (This Town) and three other projects which are slated to come out sometime next year.
The man is prolific – especially so when it comes to the Second World War. For hot on the heels of jolly spy romp SAS Rogue Heroes (another recent release) comes All The Light We Cannot See, a fraught drama about the cost of war and man's inhumanity to man. Sigh. Another?
Fans of SAS Rogue Heroes be warned, don’t come here expecting another Boy’s Own adventure. All The Light We Cannot See, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Anthony Doerr and gorgeously directed by Shawn Levy, tells the story of Marie, a blind girl (impressively played by newcomer Aria Mia Loberti) trapped in the French seaside town of St Malo. The occupying Nazis have barred the gates to stop people leaving – which means they are also sitting ducks for the nightly American air raids.
As the bombs fall, a young German radio operator, Werner Pfennig (Louis Hoffman, also excellent), has been ordered to find a mysterious radio station. A young woman’s voice is broadcasting code to the Allies every night somewhere nearby (you can see where this is going), and so the stage is set for an epic showdown in the burning ruins of the city.
Surprisingly, that’s not all of the story, though it’s certainly enough to be getting on with. There’s also a magical McGuffin, aka a mysterious cursed diamond, smuggled from Paris to St Malo by Marie’s father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo, sporting a rather self-conscious British accent). Naturally, the Nazis are on the hunt for it, and the only person who might hold the clue to its whereabouts is Marie.
That’s by far the least compelling plot thread, because it gives the whole story the rather weird air of a Second World War fairytale. Fortunately, there are plenty of other, meatier morsels to chew on: we flit back and forth between the claustrophobia of the burning city, the moral dilemmas faced by our protagonists, and Marie and Werner’s pasts.
Raised by her adoring father, we see how Marie navigates the world using her fingertips – Daniel has carved elaborate wooden models of Paris and St Malo for her as mental maps. Her story is one of love and acceptance, while Werner (brought up in an orphanage, before being brutally co-opted into the Nazi war machine) has had to fight to survive ever since he was a child.
This is where the show is at its most interesting: when it dissects the horrible things people do to each other in the name of survival. Werner is forced to kill whole families to protect his sister back home in Germany; Marie’s uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie, in what is surely the weirdest casting decision of the year) is haunted by PTSD from his time in the trenches, and of course, the Nazi baddies are scenery-chompingly evil.
But there is room for heroism, too, and hope, delivered by radio message or in acts of defiance by the French Resistance, or most often, simply by Marie finding ways to carry on living.
This is an ambitious tale. Perhaps too ambitious: the need to condense all that story into a tight four hours means the viewer is at risk of having their ankle twisted in one of several plot holes, while the action ends up being a jumbled mess of plot threads.
Characters like Etienne and his sister Madame Manec never really get the showing they deserve, and the denouement is drowned in sickly-sweet string music – but still, its message of light and hope rings true.
