TV Review: All The Light We Cannot See (2023)

All the Light We Cannot See (2023) adapted for television by Steven Knight from the novel by Anthony Doerr

1944 Saint Malo, France, is undergoing Allied bombardment. A blind girl named Marie (Aria Mia Loberti) is broadcasting from her home's attic. She reads out passages from Jules Verne and messages to her father and uncle, both of whom are absent. She desperately hopes to reconnect with them. The Nazis are desperate to find her illegal broadcast and use a young, brilliant intelligence officer named Werner (Louis Hoffman) to hunt down the signal. They assume the girl is reading out coded information to the Allies. A new Nazi shows up, Von Rumple (Lars Eidinger). He is a treasurer hunter for the Fuhrer and has his own agenda. He's come to Saint Malo in search of The Sea of Flames, a jewel of fantastic value that is claimed to be cursed. He chased it down as far as Paris, where it was in possession of a museum and considered a national treasure. The museum had a worker, Daniel LeBlanc (Mark Ruffalo), who hid many treasures and fled with The Sea of Flames. He also fled with his blind daughter, whom he loves very much and has raised mostly on his own. Her name is Marie.

The story is a combination of mystery, thriller, and family drama. The plot unwinds slowly but deliberately, giving viewers a better understanding of the characters involved. It's touching if a bit soapy. The performances are mostly good, though for some reason all the French characters have English accents and the Germans have German accents. All the Germans except Werner are a bit too cartoonishly evil, the sort you expect to see in Indiana Jones movies, not in serious dramas. Von Rumple is the only other German with more than one dimension to his character, though not much more. The French characters have enough personal problems and conflicts to fill out the drama in a satisfying way. The production values are very high and World War II makes a good backdrop. I enjoyed the story but wasn't wowed by it.

Mildly recommended--the book won the Pulitzer for fiction, so I bet it is better as a novel.

Currently (December 2023) this is only available streaming on Netflix.