The Light Between Oceans
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: September 2, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
60
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 44 Critic Reviews
Positive:
24
Mixed:
20
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ObserverRex ReedAug 31, 2016
A mesmerizing, engrossing and beautifully made cinematic experience, rare as a pink unicorn, that enchants for more than two hours and makes you wish for at least one hour more. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattAug 31, 2016
The whole thing is feverishly earnest and more than a little manipulative, but it’s also possibly the prettiest two hours of emotional ­masochism so far this year. Read full review
80
The New York TimesStephen HoldenSep 1, 2016
As a drama about adult responsibility, selfishness and moral obligations, however, it never wavers in its commitment to examine what it means to raise a child. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 1, 2016
Both Fassbender and Vikander explore their characters’ various thorny moral quandaries and shifting states of mind in breath-catching depth, drilling down through the plot’s melodramatic crust to the swirling ethical magma underneath. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawAug 31, 2016
The Light Between Oceans isn’t subtle – that swoony title should tip you off – and it’s a fair way from the realist grit of the less obviously commercial pictures Cianfrance has made previously. There’s more corn in the recipe here, a bit more ham and cheese. But he carries it off with forthright defiance and with strong, heartfelt, ingenuous performances from Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 2, 2016
It’s a well-made, serious drama arriving in an era when those qualities rarely describe multiplex fare. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChroniclePeter HartlaubSep 1, 2016
As much as Fassbender, Vikander and Rachel Weisz, the feelings of isolation, despair and self-reproach deserve top billing in The Light Between Oceans. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrSep 1, 2016
A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineSam C. MacAug 30, 2016
Derek Cianfrance's film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis. Read full review
75
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 30, 2016
This is a widescreen ode to the beauty of absolution, told with such constant sincerity that you can’t help but want to forgive its flaws. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangSep 1, 2016
The actors hurl themselves into their roles with sufficient commitment and feeling that you believe in Tom and Isabel completely, even when the creaky narrative machinery around them begins to trigger your skepticism. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonSep 1, 2016
Everything in The Light Between Oceans is deeply felt and dramatically precise, in a way that seems destined to become profoundly personal for each and every viewer. Read full review
70
Village VoiceApril WolfeAug 31, 2016
The sense of authenticity that marks The Light Between Oceans at its best has everything to do with the acting — and if all Cianfrance ever gives us is that, it's worth the price of his lagging third act. Read full review
70
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneyAug 31, 2016
The film will be remembered for its performances, but it should also be remembered for its messy, realistic examination of the complicated decisions we’re faced with in life. Read full review
67
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerSep 1, 2016
The Light Between Oceans is an effective melodrama, but the lingering sensation the film leaves after its end is that it might have been much more. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Aug 31, 2016
If the drama is purely abstract, Vikander didn’t get the memo. Even as her storyline takes on the baggage of metaphor, she plays the emotions real and raw and close — her Isabel visibly brightening as she reads her first love letter from Tom or crumbling as a terrible loss dawns upon her. Nothing symbolic there. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 2, 2016
Buried beneath this melodrama—but shining through nearly enough to justify a look — one can see the film that could have been, as anchored by great performances and emotional truth. It’s just lost in the fog. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Johanna SchnellerSep 1, 2016
What the protagonists do is simply wrong, and their attempts to fix it are first tepid, then unpleasant. Read full review
63
New York PostKyle SmithSep 1, 2016
Beautifully photographed and acted, with a somberly affecting tone, the film, by Derek Cianfrance, is nevertheless marred by severely contrived elements. Read full review
63
USA TodayBrian TruittSep 1, 2016
Well-acted but often painfully melodramatic. Read full review
63
Washington PostAnn HornadaySep 1, 2016
Nominally, The Light Between Oceans refers to the beacon’s location at the geographic point where the Indian and Pacific meet, but it could just as easily be a hint at the salty tears it’s been so carefully manufactured to induce. Ladies and gentlemen, let your hankies unfurl. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneKatie WalshSep 1, 2016
It ends up more of a study in moral and ethical decision-making, than as an emotional catharsis or release, but it's a worthy journey nonetheless. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 31, 2016
It’s a romance novel, a romantic fable, brought to life by a pretty good cast that cannot make it more than is, that cannot give it more meaning and make it less frustrating than novelist M.L. Stedman intended. Read full review
63
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanAug 30, 2016
Writer-director Derek Cianfrance knew he was dealing with a story full of coincidences when he adapted M.L. Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans, so he avoided melodrama by holding himself and his excellent actors in check. The result is a movie that crackles quietly without flaring up into an emotional blaze. Read full review
60
EmpireAnna SmithNov 7, 2016
Vikander and Fassbender are riveting in a handsome period drama that begins beautifully, but becomes increasingly contrived as it tries to wring as much drama as possible from its set-up. Read full review
60
The New YorkerAnthony LaneSep 9, 2016
Whether the film cuts it as a fully functioning weepie is another matter. I was in pieces after “Blue Valentine,” and had to be swept up from the floor of the cinema by the guy who retrieves the spilled popcorn, but the The Light Between Oceans left me disappointingly intact. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensSep 1, 2016
Cianfrance’s gift for allowing his actors to create relationships — with one another, with the camera, and with the stark landscape that surrounds them — makes The Light Between Oceans an unusually captivating romantic drama, at least until that last-act slide into self-sabotaging bathos. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicBarbara VanDenburghSep 1, 2016
For all of Cianfrance’s seriousness, the material proves too essentially melodramatic, hokey and self-serious to save. No gorgeous cinematography and no cast, no matter how A-list, can ultimately save this material from itself. Read full review
60
Time Out LondonCath ClarkeAug 31, 2016
While it’s often beautiful and moving, emotionally it never quite sticks. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanAug 30, 2016
The Light Between Oceans winds up taking one too many self-serious twists and turns. The film earns its darkness, but it might have been even more affecting if it didn’t shrink from the light. Read full review
58
Tampa Bay TimesJimmy GeurtsSep 1, 2016
Director Derek Cianfrance attempts to bring the emotional rawness of his previous films and influences to the melodrama genre with The Light Between Oceans, but he never quite pulls off the feat. Read full review
58
The Film StageJordan RaupAug 31, 2016
As a morality play that will surely leave the audience contemplating what they might have done in the situation, The Light Between Oceans mostly works. As a layered drama with indelible characters and an intricate narrative, it falls short, giving credence to the more contrived climactic moments while losing specificity. Read full review
58
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezAug 30, 2016
A lovely, but uneven moral tale of love, forgiveness and heartrending misdeeds, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans is conceptually sound, and at times, beautifully gut-wrenching. But the plaintive picture often becomes engrossed in conveying at all times just how precious life and love is. Read full review
55
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeAug 30, 2016
It’s a grand, old-school saga full of sacrifice and betrayal and loss, and just when the audience is gearing up for a powerfully tragic resolution of the kind that Thomas Hardy might have written, the movie veers off into Nicholas Sparks territory instead. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinSep 2, 2016
Here, the material is already melodramatic — the characters are at the mercy of seismic forces — and Cianfrance’s direction comes off as wildly overwrought. Read full review
50
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaSep 2, 2016
Just about the only cast member who doesn't go misty at one point or another is the horse that Down Under cinema charmer Bryan Brown takes for a trot late in the film. Read full review
50
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldSep 1, 2016
The first-rate cast — right down to that infant, who displays Streep-like instincts for the camera — toils mightily. But sadly, they’re trapped in what becomes a sort of A-list Nicholas Sparks melodrama Down Under. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversSep 1, 2016
Life mirroring nature in all its wayward ferocity. Too much? You bet. But Fassbender (Magneto in X-Men) and Vikander (an Oscar winner for The Danish Girl), who fell in love during the making of the film, fully commit to their roles and hold us in their grip. The movie, sad to say, can't keep its head above water. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAug 31, 2016
The moral dilemma at the crux of the story is what makes it interesting, and good choices were made in the casting of Fassbender and Vikander, he so deft at playing men suffering silently from inner turmoil and she so emotively open-faced. Read full review
50
Screen DailyTim GriersonAug 30, 2016
Poignant and frustrating in equal measure, The Light Between Oceans aspires to be an elegant melodrama, but the intelligence that director Derek Cianfrance and his capable cast bring to bear eventually becomes overwhelmed by the story’s emotional manipulations. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterJon FroschAug 30, 2016
The film, poised awkwardly between costume-drama prestige and all-out schmaltz, is so busy sweeping us up in a swirl of music, scenery and beautiful, suffering faces that it forgets to do the actual work of earning our emotions. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 30, 2016
A gorgeous but plodding and borderline ludicrous period-piece weeper. Read full review
48
The VergeTasha RobinsonAug 31, 2016
Cianfrance pushes too hard for his audience's emotional response, with little nuance and strange selectivity. Read full review
40
CineVueJohn BleasdaleSep 1, 2016
Adapted by Cianfrance himself, The Light Between Oceans feels overly tied to its previous form. Read full review
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