Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See is a four-hour adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel, and it spends almost all of that runtime proving why novels should not be adapted into miniseries. Steven Knight’s direction and Shawn Levy’s writing treat the source material as a treasure hunt with a map but no compass, and the result is a hollow shell of a story that feels less like a faithful rendering and more like a tourist brochure for wartime France.
The premise is simple and powerful: Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner Pfennig, a German soldier, meet during World War II. Their paths cross in occupied France, and the series follows them through a war that consumes everyone around them. On paper, that setup should work. In practice, it barely holds together.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Marie-Laure and Werner
Aria Mia Loberti plays Marie-Laure, and she is the one bright spot in this production. Her performance is warm, specific, and fully committed to the physical reality of blindness. She sells every scene she is in, and her presence anchors the first episode in a way that the rest of the series can never match.
Louis Hofmann plays Werner. He is competent, but he is also bland. The script asks him to carry Werner’s arc from a curious boy to a hardened soldier, and it never gives him the emotional tools to do it. Hofmann’s Werner is a cipher, and the series is better off for it.
The supporting cast is fine. Lars Eidinger is over-the-top as Reinhold von Rumpel, the Nazi officer hunting the titular diamond. Hugh Laurie is understated as Etienne LeBlanc, Marie-Laure’s father. Mark Ruffalo is present as Daniel LeBlanc, but his role is small enough that he could have been cut entirely without anyone noticing.
The Plot That Doesn’t Move
The series is structured as four episodes, each roughly an hour long. The first episode sets up Marie-Laure’s life in Paris, introduces Werner’s village in Germany, and establishes the war as a looming threat. The second episode follows Werner into military training, while Marie-Laure is evacuated to Saint-Malo. The third episode brings them closer together, and the fourth episode wraps everything up with a final confrontation.
That sounds like a reasonable pace. It isn’t. Each episode is padded with filler, and the pacing is so slow that the series feels twice as long as it is. The middle two episodes are particularly bad, with long stretches of exposition about radio technology and German military hierarchy that do nothing to advance the plot.
The problem is Knight’s approach to adaptation. He treats the novel as a collection of scenes rather than a story, and he refuses to cut anything. The result is a bloated mess that loses the emotional core of the original.
“It’s a treasure hunt with a map but no compass.”
The Setting
The production design is beautiful. The French countryside looks lush, the German villages look grim, and the occupied cities look worn down. The costumes are period-appropriate, and the attention to detail is impressive. But none of it matters when the story underneath is hollow.
The series also gets some of the historical details wrong. Werner is described as a “boy” in the novel, but the series ages him up to be a man in his late teens. This changes the dynamic between Werner and Marie-Laure significantly, and it undercuts the novel’s central tension. It is a small mistake, but it is emblematic of a larger problem: the series is not interested in being faithful, it is interested in being glossy.
The Technical Work
The cinematography is competent, though it leans heavily on wide shots and sweeping landscapes to compensate for the weak writing. The sound design is good, and the score is forgettable. The editing is choppy, with frequent cuts that break the flow of a scene.
The visual effects are the worst offender. The series uses CGI extensively to recreate occupied France, and it looks cheap. The digital matte paintings are obvious, the crowds are thin, and the buildings are generic. It is the kind of effect that reminds you that you are watching a TV show, not a movie.
The Missing Heart
The biggest problem with All the Light We Cannot See is that it lacks a beating heart. The novel is a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a war story, all wrapped into one. The series tries to do all three, but it fails at all of them. The love story is underdeveloped, the coming-of-age story is rushed, and the war story is background noise.
The series also misses the novel’s central metaphor: light and darkness. The novel is full of imagery about seeing and not seeing, about knowledge and ignorance, about the things we can see and the things we cannot. The series touches on it occasionally, but it never commits to it. The result is a series that is visually rich but emotionally empty.
The Verdict
All the Light We Cannot See is a failure. It is a failure of faithfulness, a failure of focus, and a failure of execution. It is a series that could have been great, but it chose to be glossy instead. The cast is talented, the settings are beautiful, and the premise is compelling. None of that matters when the story is this broken.
If you want to watch a story about Marie-Laure and Werner, read the novel. If you want to watch a beautiful-looking series that does not engage with its material, watch this. The difference is the difference between a good story and a good-looking story.
The series is available to stream on Netflix. It is a four-hour commitment that you will regret after the first thirty minutes.
What Went Wrong
- The pacing is slow and repetitive
- The historical details are inconsistent
- The visual effects are cheap and obvious
- The central metaphor is underdeveloped
- The supporting cast is wasted
What Went Right
- Aria Mia Loberti delivers a strong performance
- The production design is beautiful
- The sound design is solid
- The score is unobtrusive
The novel All the Light We Cannot See deserves a better adaptation. This is not it.
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