All the Light We Cannot See review: An unfortunately flat Netflix adaptation

But the talent doesn't stop there. The teleplay and writing for the series has been done by none other than Steven Knight, who is on course to have an increasingly busy TV series period before him with the likes of This Town, SAS Rogue Heroes and a recently rumoured university-based BBC drama.

Add on to that some pretty major acting names including Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie, as well as rising talent Aria Mia Loberti and Louis Hofman, and when you look at it like this, All the Light We Cannot See has everything going for it.

So, it's safe to say there was a twinge of disappointment when I finished the series and felt slightly short-changed by the four hours of television I'd sat down to.

The series centres on Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Loberti), a blind teenager who has been taught independence from a young age by her museum curator father Daniel (Ruffalo). He's never viewed her blindness as a hinderance, pushing her to learn more and do more in the world.

We meet Marie by herself in the attic of her Uncle Etienne's (Laurie) home, where she is broadcasting from a radio for help. Explosions shatter the windows around her and we see that as she broadcasts, young German soldier Werner Pfennig (Hofman) is listening to the same station. And so begins the story of how the pair have found themselves in the French coastal town of Saint-Malo, both using the simple medium of radio to provide not just communication, but hope.

The series is planted in the main timeline of 1944, but we're quickly transported to various flashbacks to get a sense of how we came to be at this final dramatic point in Saint-Malo.

Nell Sutton stars as the young version of Marie, providing a sweet-natured energy to a generally serious series, seemingly at home making witty jokes at the expense of her on-screen father and learning how to navigate Paris via the wooden model city he has crafted for her. We briefly explore Marie's childhood 10 years prior and see that it's via this model city that she learns how to walk around without the guidance of Daniel, thereby becoming the independent woman we know in the future.

While the first episode feels largely like you just have to trust the process and be swept along for the slightly confusing ride of a plot line, the series starts to make a little more sense the further into it we get. Could it take an award for the slowest series you're likely to watch anytime soon? Most likely.

We start to understand how Marie and Werner's individual interest in a particular radio station and faceless Professor host has continued to be a beacon of light in their lives. The enigmatic radio host broadcasts stories and lessons on topics that provide these two young people the only sliver of hope in darker times of confusion.

It's the kind of series that, by premise alone really, is all rather poetic and metaphorical. But the series suffers from bouts of lengthy dialogue and discussions of things we should really be seeing for ourselves.

When a series is based on a well-known bestseller such as this, there is a risk of not transferring the magic of the written word over to a Netflix project like this. Unfortunately, All the Light We Cannot See underlines just that. Where the novel's poeticism and gripping commentary drive the story forward, here, we're bandied about in various timelines, forced to understand characters that we don't really ever get to know completely.

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• Meet the cast of All the Light We Cannot See

Snippets of information are thrown in without any real meaningful return to them, such as the fate of Marie-Laure's mother or Werner's sister Jutta. Let's also not get started on the clumsily woven in antagonist plot line involving a Gestapo soldier who is chasing after Daniel and Marie-Laure in search of a legendary diamond.

Rather confusingly, there's both a real slow-burning nature to this series, as well as it also feeling hurried in places. There's little focus on the things that would matter in a tale like this and almost too much on things that you'll forget about soon after watching. Because of this, the tale of hope and resistance grows to be slightly unbelievable by the end, veering, for me, on the side of being slightly cringe-worthy.

All the Light We Cannot See is visually impressive and can feel like a movie in places, with its glossy production. But, unfortunately, the quality desperately lacks in other places such as the convincing writing of these characters and their four-episode arcs.

It's a shame, really, as with the likes of Laurie and Loberti, their acting could've been put to better use. That being said, their scenes together provide some of the real warmth of the series. If only there was more of it. Likewise, Hofman is utterly convincing as the young orphan who is drafted in to serve in the German army against his will.

All the Light We Cannot See isn't the archetypal Second World War tale we're necessarily used to, but it's one that I struggle to think is really needed when done in this way.

If we're to use the very real history of Saint-Malo, World War II and the resistance movement, you'd want a drama like this to have more meat on its bones and be more emotionally complex. Instead, the parts that are intended to leave you beaming or welling up just don't.

In the ever-growing world of adaptation series, perhaps this is one that should've been left for the pages and not transferred onto screen – at least in this way.

All the Light We Cannot See will premiere on Netflix on Thursday 2nd November 2023. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is available to buy now.

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