IN 1925, a rowboat containing the body of a dead man and a living girl baby washes ashore on an island off WA. There, returned soldier Tom (Michael Fassbender) keeps the lighthouse (director Derek Cianfrance casts the one at Cape Campbell, NZ, in that important role.)

Tom and wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander) who’ve already learned the hard way that they can’t be confident of having babies, decide to tell the local community that the infant is their own, born early.

A happy family enjoys a satisfying lifestyle in an idyllic location. Lovely stuff, but not effective material to sustain a film that runs for 133 minutes. Baby Lucy grows up playing with the tiny silver rattle that Tom found with her on the rowboat. Around that tiny happenstance, novelist M L Stedman crafted a story that Cianfrance adapted into an exploration of powerful issues. For in a perfectly logical way, the story introduces Hannah (Rachel Weisz) still, after fewer that six years, grieving for the husband and child she had lost.

Here’s a situation that a novelist in the Victorian era might have pushed to the brink of disaster before making up his/her mind whether to return the moppet to her birth mother or leave her in the loving care of the woman who reared her as her own (the film neatly, effectively and unobtrusively deals with the problem of providing milk for an unweaned babe in that time and place). In coming to resolution of that intimate, small-scale and heart-rending dilemma, the film guides real-life situations through legal and moral tensions and anxieties that build almost to bursting point before choosing a resolution that will or won’t please you, depending on which side you decide to support.

The film’s a weepie, but for the best of reasons, a totally suitable vehicle for intelligent, compassionate viewers to mull over, endure and come away from well satisfied.