The Light Between Oceans is a film haunted by ghosts: the ghosts of war, the ghosts of lost loves, lost children and of conscience. Derek Cianfrance has abandoned the semi-improvised stylings of Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines and produced a Merchant Ivory Gothic romance that swings from the heights of a Douglas Sirk melodrama to the depths of a Jimmy McGovern morality play.

Cianfrance’s camera alerts you first to his newfound maturity. The loss of the ‘naturalistic’ shaking camera of cinéma-vérité welcomes in its place the placid calm of measured camera pans and aerial shots of the Australian isles. The visual formality captures the desolateness of a society rebuilding itself from the ruins of war, shots of bucolic vistas peopled by no one. Adam Arkapaw, Cianfrance’s cinematographer, holds the camera on the performers, their moral compromises and burgeoning love playing out on the fleshy terrain of their faces. As much as Cianfrance wants to capture the initially alluring isolation of the lighthouse his characters inhabit, he also wants to show its capacity for horror. One bravura set-piece shows the lighthouse caught in an epic storm as Vikander’s character is suffering her first miscarriage, the island smothered in sea mist, the staircase that will lead her to her husband growing ever-longer in Hitchcockian fashion.

The ghosts of war are captured in Michael Fassbender’s restrained performance. He catches the stoic repression of a man haunted by battle. His perennially clenched jaw, through a rigour mortis grin, makes each smile a tiny agony. As the façade disintegrates, one feels like they’re watching a statue cry. Alicia Vikander, sprightly and forceful, overcomes the discrepancies in her antipodean-Swedish hybrid of an accent and fleshes out a character that could have been a shamble of tears into an uncompromising woman chased by grief. Her former skittish ebullience manifesting into twitchy mania as the film’s events takes its toll on her person.

Sound is utilised like spirits in a room. The asynchronous use of the voices from proceeding scenes disrupting the present feels like the echoes of the characters’ conscience slowly weighing in on their questionable decisions. The narration of their letters (the film’s way of combating the epistolary motifs of the novel) fills the soundtrack with their romance, even as it is threatened and becomes whisper of what it once was.

As you might have noticed, The Light Between Oceans is overlaid with allegory. The eponymous light between oceans is not only a beacon but so also is the love between between Fassbender and Vikander, whose growing distance in the film’s latter half is saved by its glow. The use of the discordant thumps of a piano as Vikander’s character loses her first child mid-recital show the disruption of the pair’s harmonious idyll and foreshadows the horror that is soon to come. Such symbols might sound portentous, but it is to misunderstand how the film should be appreciated. This is not naturalism but cinematic theatricalism. The objective is to eviscerate you emotionally through any means possible: visual, aural and performative, not through self-identification and the distillation of a genuine moment. How many of you have stolen a baby washed up on the shore? Cianfrance wants to capture the spectacle of love and the horror of its destruction – subtlety won’t do.

This is not to say the film is a total success. The pacing is ponderous and occasionally the shots of the couple’s swooning can grow tedious. But Cianfrance, and the cast, should be praised for aiming for something grander than his earlier ‘grittily authentic’ cinema. The Light Between Oceans is a throwback, Cianfrance following in the footsteps of revivalists like Anthony Minghella and Joe Wright in restoring the splendour of epic romantic cinema