Telly Review: All The Light We Cannot See coasts along on its source material

Aria Mia Loberti as Marie-Laure, Mark Ruffalo as Daniel LeBlanc in All the Light We Cannot See.

All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix) is the best book I’ve read in years. It wraps you up for hours, sweeping you back to 1944, France, the walled city of Saint-Malo. 

A young woman, Marie-Laure, is broadcasting coded messages to the Allies, identifying targets in the city that are occupied by the Germans. 

A young German radio operator, Werner, is trying to find her. So is a Nazi officer, Reinhold Von Rumpel, who thinks she has a rare diamond. 

Marie-Laure is blind, Werner is kind and good, and Von Rumpel is a psychopath. It was an astonishing piece of storytelling.

You couldn’t say the same about the new four-part TV adaptation on Netflix. It lacks the charm of the book; it rushes you into the story rather than letting it emerge, and the Nazis are just too Nazi.

Lars Eidinger plays Von Rumpel. I loved him in Babylon Berlin (a must-watch), but he’s scene-stealing bonkers here and it ruins the subtlety of the story.

Aria Mia Loberti plays Marie-Laure without filling the role. The woman is a powerhouse in the book — here she seems way too passive. Mark Ruffalo lacks substance as her father. Hugh Laurie is good as her uncle, but that’s mainly because he’s Hugh Laurie and he’s good at everything.

And yet, it’s worth a watch. I was cranky during the first two episodes, because it lacked the emotional heft of the book. But I was all in by the end, as the various German characters closed in on Marie-Laure.

L-R: Louis Hofmann as Werner Pfennig, Ed Skrein as Herr Seidler, Luna Wedler as Jutta in All the Light We Cannot See.

This is mainly because of Werner, the good German being forced to hunt her by his Nazi masters. He was raised in an orphanage with his sister, listening to short-wave radio broadcasts from someone called The Professor, who explained how truth and reason can overcome lies and darkness, at a time when listening to foreign broadcasts was banned in Nazi Germany.

It’s a good message, particularly now. Werner is a believable character, played beautifully by Louis Hofmann, who will be familiar to fans of Dark. He is anguished, kind and ruthless when he needs to be, and he really needs to be in Saint-Malo.

The only problem I had was that he was speaking English, as were all the characters. OK, the book is written in English by an American author, Anthony Doerr. But you can’t have subtitles in a book.

The TV show felt very American, despite being shot in France. It’s bland when two characters, played by American actors, are talking English in a half-arsed French accent. 

Likewise, two German characters chatting in English feels a bit ’Allo ’Allo. But this is aimed at the US market, and the Yanks don’t like subtitles apparently.

In the end, the bare bones of the story are enough to merit sticking with All the Light We Cannot See. So give it a watch. And when you’re finished, read the book.