The Light Between Oceans ?was a joy to me in so many ways. For one thing, it had a genuinely linear plot, one in which every succesive episode developed from the one before it, instead of just being one of a series of incidents that could have been in any order, like the ones in Mad Max: Fury Road or even Nebraska.
We start with a man living a lonely life in a lighthouse, so it's logical that he marries a pretty girl from a nearby small town. But she has a couple of miscarriages and very much wants a family. And then a baby girl washes ashore in a rowboat, and the first moral dilemma appears. There is no reason to expect the baby to ever be identified, so the wife wants to raise her as her own. The husband, who was content as a lighthouse keeper and isn't so interested in having people around, wants to report the discovery as the law requires, and we have the second and third dilemmas, between husband and wife and, potentially, between the couple and the law. And it's no spoiler to tell you what you would expect to happen next: the baby is identified after all, because of a stupid but understandable mistake the wife makes, and the biological mother enters the scene. And I'm not going any further than that, because you won't be able to guess the rest, and there's a lot yet to come.
The Light Between Oceans is paced slow enough to develop all these themes and the rest that follow; it used to be that all movies were made like that, before action and special effects took over. All the characters are sympathetic, with Alicia Vikander especially effective as the wife, a remarkable combination of little girl and determined woman. You'll want a happy ending for everybody, and I'm not telling you whether you'll get one. But you're offered an emotional experience not many movies attempt any more.
