All the Light We Cannot See review: Love and darkness in the midst of war

It is easy to dismiss an in-your-face series about love, hope and light. But take these three out of this already wretched world and what will we be left with? All the Light We Cannot See, a limited-series adaptation of Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer-winning novel by the same name is all terrible beauty  — a sweeping cinematic adaptation of a tale of darkness, beauty, evil, and light.

Set during WWII and narrated in shifting time periods, this is a coming-of-age tale of an orphan German boy Werner (Louis Hofmann) and a blind French girl Marie (Aria Loberti). Werner has a gift for tinkering with radios while Marie loves listening to it. Both listen to a mysterious late-night broadcast for children by someone who calls himself 'Professor'. He encourages them to hang in there when their lives as they know it are falling apart around them. The rest of the story is about how their greatly different worlds somehow collide thanks to an almost mystical synchronicity that involves radios, diamonds, secret codes and the Gestapo.

This is Aria's debut and perhaps the fact that she is also blind in real life is what makes the cinematography greatly tactile — you see the town of Saint-Malo as much as you 'touch' its cobbled paths and glass shrapnels.

Watching (and hearing) the relentless bombing of the beautiful seaside French town is realising how our lives have always been densely layered with hope despite the unabating horror, whether it is children being bombed senseless in 2023 or children being gassed in 1944. The lyrical prose, admittedly heavy-handed dialogues and sweet earnestness may turn away the cynics but a little persistence will yield a tale that just might make you feel heartened in a world ridden with cruelty and strife. As the Professor (and nearly everyone else in the movie) says again and again, "The most important light is the light we cannot see."