Every Friday, our film critic Grace Kinsey will review a new release at the cinema. This week, she gives her verdict on The Light Between Oceans.

The director of The Light Between Oceans, Derek Cianfrance, has shown in his past works (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) that he has a talent for portraying relationships, and for testing their boundaries.

His latest release is no different. It is, of course, unfortunate that it does not feature Ryan Gosling, who usually appears in Cianfrance's films, but Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander more than make up for his absence.

The film is set in the 1920s. Fassbender plays Tom, a steely-yet-soft First World War veteran, who lives as a lighthouse-keeper on an island in Western Australia;Vikander plays Isabel, his wife. The two are desperate to start a family, so when a baby girl washes up on their island in a boat, they decide to raise her as their own.

Cianfrance always manages to create a personal atmosphere in his films. He strives to replicate the uninhibited feeling people experience in their homes. And sure enough, throughout The Light Between Oceans, the feeling that you are watching something intensely private is striking.

Thanks to the use of documentary-style filming, the viewer feels like a fly on the wall – not intruding, just watching Tom and Isabel's natural movements within the environment where they feel most comfortable.

That environment, the so-called Janus Rock, with golden and pastel sunsets and a permanent sea breeze, is overwhelming in its beauty and its romance. Not only is the setting incredibly aesthetically pleasing, it also isolates the characters in a space, emphasising them as the centre of their own world and their own story – a world and a story we are allowed to enter.

And the way in which Fassbender and Vikander interact is so natural. They play two people who are totally content in each other's company, and, despite the fact they only have eyes for each other, the audience is lucky enough to be present, watching their relationship develop, and getting swept further and further into the romance.

If you weren't already tearing up, you are bound to be when Cianfrance, having secured your emotional investment in Tom and Isabel's family, shows the audience, and his characters, that events require decisions, and that decisions necessarily have consequences. In fact, forget tearing up. You'll probably be a total soggy mess.

The soundtrack to The Light Between Oceans is really the only problem I have with the film. The slow, rising-and-falling orchestral music is an obvious choice when it comes to pulling at heartstrings, but it is used so often behind the film's drama that it becomes quite distracting and at times verges on annoying.

Cianfrance has once again thrown himself into the genre of sentimental drama. He has provided us with everything we could have dared to hope for, and the result is most certainly a success.

And by success I mean a Nicholas Sparks-esque, mascara-running, sleeve-dampening cry-fest.

4/5