The Light Between OceansMovies like The Light Between Oceans
- Key Features:
- Grief, Moral dilemma, Adoption, Isolation, Guilt, Forbidden love, Marriage, Loss of a parent, Infidelity, Secrecy, Post-war, Period piece, Melodrama
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic, restrained
- Target Audience:
- Drama enthusiasts, Literary adaptation fans, Mature audiences, Romantics
- Emotional Arc:
- Hope → Despair → Acceptance
The Light Between Oceans

A lighthouse keeper and his wife living off the coast of Western Australia raise a baby they rescue from an adrift rowboat.
The Light Between Oceans
Pirates take over a lighthouse on a rocky island. They then execute a devious plan to cause ships to run aground, pillaging their wrecks. A lone member of the lighthouse crew survives, and he deperately fights their plot. A shipwrecked maiden that avoids the pirates slaughter soon complicates the situation.

Rachel Carson, a best-selling crime novelist, is devastated and filled with guilt over the accidental death of her son. Hoping that a change of scenery will help alleviate her suffering, she leaves her home in the city and moves into a vacant country house owned by a friend and begins a relationship with charming local Angus. But, just as her life is taking a turn for the better, Rachel realizes she's being romanced by a ghost, leading her to doubt her own sanity.

Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity while living on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.

The duty manager of a seaside cinema, who is struggling with her mental health, forms a relationship with a new employee on the south coast of England in the 1980s.

The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot.

Three lighthouse keepers on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland discover something that isn't theirs to keep.

While James More is held captive by terrorists in Somalia, thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, his lover Danny Flinders prepares to dive herself in a submersible into the deep bottom of the ocean, tormented by the memories of their brief encounter in France and her inability to know his whereabouts.

A three-year-old boy disappears during his mother's high school reunion. Nine years later, by chance, he turns up in the town in which the family has just relocated.

The story of the last Seal Child’s journey home. After their mother’s disappearance, Ben and Saoirse are sent to live with Granny in the city. When they resolve to return to their home by the sea, their journey becomes a race against time as they are drawn into a world Ben knows only from his mother’s folktales. But this is no bedtime story; these fairy folk have been in our world far too long. It soon becomes clear to Ben that Saoirse is the key to their survival.

Parent and child journey through the outskirts of society a decade after a pandemic has wiped out half the world's population. As a father struggles to protect his child, their bond—and the character of humanity—is tested.

Paolo is a sceptical 30-year-old who works unwillingly as a sales clerk in a Turin department store. Mia is a back-up singer in a band and lives her life haphazardly, which leads her to being practically homeless. One night, they bump into each other by chance, in a gay club in Turin. It will be the beginning of an emotional adventure and a journey across the country looking for the father of Mia’s baby.

Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a survivor and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.

In 1964, atomic war wipes out humanity in the northern hemisphere; one American submarine finds temporary safe haven in Australia, where life-as-usual covers growing despair. In denial about the loss of his wife and children in the holocaust, American Captain Towers meets careworn but gorgeous Moira Davidson, who begins to fall for him. The sub returns after reconnaissance a month (or less) before the end; will Towers and Moira find comfort with each other?

A motorcycle stunt rider considers committing a crime in order to provide for his wife and child, an act that puts him on a collision course with a cop-turned-politician.

Newly arrived to a remote desert town, Catherine and Matthew are tormented by a suspicion when their two teenage children mysteriously vanish.

On the Japanese island of Amami, despite lacking parental guidance, Kaito and his girlfriend Kyoko try to find their place in the world. While Kaito suffers from the absence of his father, who moved to Tokyo after his birth, Kyoko must come to grips with her mother’s terminal illness.

A mother travels to Patagonia with her autistic son with the hope that a ranger and a pod of wild orcas can help him find an emotional connection.

Unhappily married, Julia Sturges decides to go to America with her two children on the Titanic. Her husband, Richard also arranges passage on the luxury liner so as to have custody of their two children. All this fades to insignificance once the ship hits an iceberg.

A supernatural love story that centers on two parents whose life together falls apart after their son dies. The man, now a successful lawyer, and the woman, now married and an author, get a chance at reconciliation ten years later.

In an alternate universe where twinned worlds have opposite gravities, a young man battles interplanetary prejudice and the laws of physics in his quest to reunite with the long-lost girl of his dreams in this visually stunning romantic adventure that poses the question: what if love was stronger than gravity?

Johan and his family are Mennonites from the north of Mexico. Against the law of God and Man, Johan falls in love with another woman.

Ben and Laura are a passionate but volatile couple who embark on a round-the-world sailing adventure to give their relationship a new start. During their trip, they decide to explore a vast deserted island which they discover off the coast of Chile. Caught in a violent storm, they shelter in an abandoned whaling station for the night but wake up the next morning to find their boat has disappeared. Stranded in a hostile environment with no means of communication, dwindling supplies and winter approaching they must work together in a life and death battle for survival, that will challenge their feelings and change their relationship forever.

A young man raised by scientists on Mars returns to Earth to find his father.

When a teenager suddenly disappears without a trace, the case is assigned to an alcoholic police officer who maintains a complicated relationship with his own troubled teenage son, suspected of drug trafficking.

An Australian couple takes a sailing trip in the Pacific to get over the recent loss of their son. While on the open sea, they come across a sinking ship with one survivor who is not at all what he seems.

Ten years have gone by since Elena's six-year old son has disappeared. The last thing she heard of him was a phone call he gave her, saying that he was lost on a beach in France and couldn't find his father. Nowadays, Elena lives on this same beach and manages a restaurant. She is finally beginning to emerge from this tragic episode when she meets a French teenager who strongly reminds her of her lost son. The two of them will embark on a relationship which will sow chaos and distrust around them.

Two small children and a ship's cook survive a shipwreck and find safety on an idyllic tropical island. Soon, however, the cook dies and the young boy and girl are left on their own. Days become years and Emmeline and Richard make a home for themselves surrounded by exotic creatures and nature's beauty. But will they ever see civilization again?

A married couple are faced with a difficult decision - to improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer's disease.

An extraordinary look at the lives of a middle-aged couple in the midst of the wife's breast cancer diagnosis.

After a yachting accident, a millionaire and his wife are shipwrecked on a desert island along with their former deckhand, Manuel.

The world has finally managed to blow itself up and only Australia has been spared from nuclear destruction and a gigantic wave of radiation is floating in on the breezes. One American sub located in the Pacific has survived and is met with disdain by the Australians. The calculations of Australia's most renowned scientist says the country is doomed. However, one of his rivals says that he is wrong. He believes that a 1000 people can be relocated to the northern hemisphere, where his assumptions indicate the radiation levels may be lower. The American Captain is asked to take a mission to the north to determine which scientist is right.

Trapped within an eerie mist, the residents of Antonio Bay have become the unwitting victims of a horrifying vengeance. One hundred years earlier, a ship carrying lepers was purposely lured onto the rocky coastline and sank, drowning all aboard. Now they're back – long-dead mariners who've waited a century for their revenge.

Travis and Gabby first meet as neighbors in a small coastal town and wind up in a relationship that is tested by life's most defining events.

Arranged to marry a rich man, young Ada is crushed when her true love goes missing at sea during a migration attempt — until a miracle reunites them.

Elodie and Laetitia live in close love and dream of having a child. As Elodie discovers that she cannot get pregnant because of a health problem and encounters financial troubles, they decide to take a roommate.

Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aboriginal boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

During a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, a veteran mariner awakes to find his vessel taking on water after a collision with a stray shipping container. With his radio and navigation equipment disabled, he sails unknowingly into a violent storm and barely escapes with his life. With any luck, the ocean currents may carry him into a shipping lane -- but, with supplies dwindling and the sharks circling, the sailor is forced to face his own mortality.

A man's family brought back from the verge of death, he then discovers he can identify people who are about to die.

A WWII pilot, bombardier, and radioman find themselves adrift on a lifeboat without food or water after being forced to ditch their plane during a scouting mission.

A restless photographer leaves her family to "find herself" and takes up deep-sea diving.

Middle-aged Gerald Kingsland advertises in a London paper for a female companion to spend a year with him on a desert island. The young Lucy Irving takes a chance on contacting him and after a couple of meetings they decide to go ahead. Once on the island things prove a lot less idyllic than in the movies, and gradually it becomes clear that it is Lucy who has the desire and the strength to try and see the year through.

A man who returns home to find his wife cheating on him on their anniversary. He holds her and her naked and humiliated lover captive at gunpoint while he decides whether or not he's going to kill them. The story, inspired by true events, takes place over one day and is set in New Orleans during a stifling heat wave.

Outside the Australian town of Jindabyne, local man Stuart Kane is on a fishing trip with friends when they discover the body of a murdered girl.

In 1950s Ireland and New York, young Eilis Lacey has to choose between two men and two countries.

After a year of long-distance, Raquel and Ares reunite on a steamy beach trip. Faced with fresh flirtations and insecurities, will their love prevail?

Following an unexpected tragedy, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe meets a nine year old boy named Cole Sear, who is hiding a dark secret.

Sandy, a geologist, finds herself stuck on a field trip to the Pilbara desert with a Japanese man she finds inscrutable, annoying and decidedly arrogant. Hiromitsu's view of her is not much better. Things go from bad to worse when they become stranded in one of the most remote regions on Earth.

A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.

With her husband Jack perpetually away at work, Margaret Hall raises her children virtually alone. Her teenage son is testing the waters of the adult world, and early one morning she wakes to find the dead body of his gay lover on the beach of their rural lakeside home. What would you do? What is rational and what do you do to protect your child? How far do you go and when do you stop?

Emilia, a law-school graduate, falls in love with her married boss, Jack. After Emilia marries Jack, her happiness turns unexpectedly to grief following the death of her infant daughter. Devastated, Emilia nonetheless carries on, attempting to forge a connection with her stepson William and to resist the interference of Jack's jealous ex-wife.

Put in charge of his young son, Ali leaves Belgium for Antibes to live with his sister and her husband as a family. Ali's bond with Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, grows deeper after Stephanie suffers a horrible accident.

In a windswept fishing village, a mother is torn between protecting her beloved son and her own sense of right and wrong. A lie she tells for him rips apart their family and close-knit community.

Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet through a casual encounter, but they find a deeper connection and become a couple. Individually and together, they are risk takers — compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity and to be true to himself.

After falling in love in Paris, Marina and Neil come to Oklahoma, where problems arise. Their church's Spanish-born pastor struggles with his faith, while Neil encounters a woman from his childhood.

A German woman on a ship returning to Europe notices a face of another woman which brings recollections from the past. She tells her husband that she had been an overseer in Auschwitz during the war, but she has actually saved a woman's life.

At an international school in Jakarta, a philosophy teacher challenges his class of twenty graduating seniors to choose which ten of them would take shelter underground and reboot the human race in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories fill the gaps between camcorder footages as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the troubled man she didn't.

Martin, a young blind photographer, is divided between his friendship with restaurant worker Andy and the exclusive love that Celia—who is terribly jealous of this new friendship—has for him.

A couple of fisher-folk are joined by a young new apprentice in the middle of a raging storm.

101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story of her life aboard the Titanic, 84 years later. A young Rose boards the ship with her mother and fiancé. Meanwhile, Jack Dawson and Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets aboard the ship. Rose tells the whole story from Titanic's departure through to its death—on its first and last voyage—on April 15, 1912.

A manager of an orphanage in India is sent to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he discovers a life-altering family secret.

Ex-football star Mike Gambril meets Terry McKay on a flight to Sydney, which is forced to land on a small atoll. They become romantic on board a ship sent to take them to a larger island. They agree to meet in New York three months later to see if the attraction is real. One shows up but the other doesn't. However, a chance meeting brings them together again.

Jack Slavin is an environmentalist with a heart condition who lives with his daughter, Rose, on an isolated island. While Jack fights against developers who wish to build in the area, he also craves more contact with other people. When he invites his girlfriend, Kathleen, and her sons, Rodney and Thaddius, to move in, Rose is upset. The complicated family dynamics makes things difficult for everyone in the house.

Mikey and Rose are professional assassins. They are also lovers, and once upon a time Rose also knew Mikey's father. During an elaborate hit job for a malicious gangster, Rose fails to kill the main target, the gangster's pregnant girlfriend. Instead, she delivers her baby and convinces Mikey to help her protect them both. As Rose weakens from cancer, Mikey becomes breadwinner for this unusual family. But tranquility will not last.

Stranded in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, a man sets in motion an unlikely plan to protect the precious cargo he carries: his infant daughter.

Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.

After a childhood of abuse by his evangelistic father, misfit Oscar Hopkins becomes an Anglican minister and develops a divine obsession with gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a rich Australian heiress shopping in London for materials for her newly acquired glass factory back home. Deciding to travel to Australia as a missionary, Oscar meets Lucinda aboard ship, and a mutual obsession blossoms. They make a wager that will alter each of their destinies.

After a bleak childhood, Jane Eyre goes out into the world to become a governess. As she lives happily in her new position at Thornfield Hall, she meets the dark, cold, and abrupt master of the house, Mr. Rochester. Jane and her employer grow close in friendship and she soon finds herself falling in love with him. Happiness seems to have found Jane at last, but could Mr. Rochester's terrible secret be about to destroy it forever?

After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.

In the days following the surrender of Germany in May 1945, a group of young German prisoners of war is handed over to the Danish authorities and subsequently sent to the West Coast, where they are ordered to remove the more than two million mines that the Germans had placed in the sand along the coast. With their bare hands, crawling around in the sand, the boys are forced to perform the dangerous work under the leadership of a Danish sergeant.

The lives of Ted and Marion Cole are thrown into disarray when their two adolescent sons die in a car wreck. Marion withdraws from Ted and Ruth, the couple's daughter. Ted, a well-known writer, hires as his assistant a student named Eddie, who looks oddly similar to one of the Coles' dead sons. The couple separate, and Marion begins an affair with Eddie, while Ted has a dalliance with his neighbor Evelyn.

The relationships of two couples become complicated and deceitful when the man from one couple meets the woman of the other.

A woman finds a romantic letter in a bottle washed ashore and tracks down the author, a widowed shipbuilder whose wife died tragically early. As a deep and mutual attraction blossoms, the man struggles to make peace with his past so that he can move on and find happiness.

A teenage boy and girl discover a renewed sense of possibility as they go on a road trip to photograph lighthouses along the California coast.

Will believes his wife Rosalind is innocent of their son's suspected murder, only to discover the devastating truth behind her past links her to another unsolved crime.

Hanna and Simon are in a 20 year marriage with an unexciting relationship. By chance, they both meet and start separate affairs with Adam. Adam has no idea that his two lovers are married, until they are all found out when Hanna becomes pregnant, with the natural doubts stemming from their situation.

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.

A woman's seaside vacation takes a dark turn when her obsession with a young mother forces her to confront secrets from her past.

A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family.

A successful writer of children's books, Stephen Lewis is confronted with the unthinkable—he loses his only child, four-year-old Kate, in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realises his daughter is gone. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife on diverging paths as both struggle with an all-consuming grief.

A switchman at a seaside railway witnesses a murder but does not report it after he finds a suitcase full of money at the scene of the crime.

Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces firsthand.

Grace lives an idyllic life in a British seaside town, but her world soon comes crashing down when her husband of 29 years tells her he's leaving her for another woman. Through stages of shock, disbelief and anger -- and with support from her son -- Grace ultimately regains her footing while learning it's never too late to be happy.

Renowned oceanographer Steve Zissou has sworn vengeance upon the rare shark that devoured a member of his crew. In addition to his regular team, he is joined on his boat by Ned, a man who believes Zissou to be his father, and Jane, a journalist pregnant by a married man. They travel the sea, all too often running into pirates and, perhaps more traumatically, various figures from Zissou's past, including his estranged wife, Eleanor.

In the aftermath of WWI, a young German who grieves the death of her fiancé in France meets a mysterious French man who visits the fiance’s grave to lay flowers.

In the last days of a dying logging town, Christian returns to his family home for his father Henry’s wedding. While home, Christian reconnects with his childhood friend Oliver, who has stayed in town working at Henry’s timber mill and is now out of a job. As Christian gets to know Oliver’s wife Charlotte, daughter Hedvig, and father Walter, he discovers a secret that could tear Oliver’s family apart.

In the midst of a marital crisis, a High Court judge must decide if she should order a life-saving blood transfusion for a teen with cancer despite his family's refusal to accept medical treatment for religious reasons.

Starting his new job as an instructor at a New England school for the deaf, James Leeds meets Sarah Norman, a young deaf woman who works at the school as a member of the custodial staff. In spite of Sarah's withdrawn emotional state, a romance slowly develops between the pair.

Freed after a lengthy term in a juvenile detention center, convicted child killer Jack Burridge finds work as a deliveryman and begins dating co-worker Michelle. While out on the road one day, Jack notices a distressed child, and, after reuniting the girl with her family, becomes a local celebrity. But when a local newspaper unearths his past, Jack must cope with the anger of citizens who fear for the safety of their children.

David loves his wife, Gillian. Unfortunately, she died two years ago. David deals with his grief by continuing his romance with Gillian during walks with her "ghost" on the beach at night. While David lives in the past, other family problems crop up in the present in the real world....

Lucas travels to visit his sister to a remote town in southern Chile. In front of the ocean and the fog, he meets Antonio, a boatswain in a local fishing boat. When an intense romance grows between them, their strength, their independence and their adulthood become immovable in front of the tide.

The story of a husband who suspects his wife of adultery, and sets out to track down the other man in her life.

In 1919, Australian farmer Joshua Connor travels to Turkey to discover the fate of his three sons, reported missing in action. Holding on to hope, Joshua must travel across the war-torn landscape to find the truth and his own peace.

A young couple escapes Ireland, dreaming of a new life during the land giveaway in Oklahoma. As they struggle to survive against betrayal and harsh winter conditions, they must fend off her parents who are determined to bring her back home.

Donato fails in his attempt to save a drowning man, and meets one of the man's friends. He decides to start his life over, but pieces of his past keep coming after him.

An unexpected meeting on a train leads two travelers to spend an evening wandering through Vienna. As the night unfolds, they share stories and conversations about life and love, exploring new ideas while a quiet intimacy grows between them, knowing it may be their only night together.

After his older brother passes away, Lee Chandler is forced to return home to care for his 16-year-old nephew. There he is compelled to deal with a tragic past that separated him from his family and the community where he was born and raised.


