Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in The Light Between Oceans (Dreamworks/Walt Disney Studios)

The rocky Western Australian coast seizes a starring role in The Light Between Oceans (though largely filmed in New Zealand, actually). Alternately forbidding and beguiling, the landscape stretches into eternity, inviting reflection on its vastness and our insignificance within it. Don’t be drawn in by The Light’s openness, though. Behind the film’s sweeping vistas lies the spirit of a micromanager, an entity that does not trust us with our own emotions and wants to steer us firmly where it thinks they should lie.

In the aftermath of the Great War, taciturn survivor Tom (Michael Fassbender) agrees to take a post as the keeper of a lighthouse on a windswept crag far out to sea. Bored with life in her small town, much younger Isabel (Alicia Vikander) hurls herself at the strapping veteran and persuades him to take her out to the promontory as his wife. The two are in love and want a family, but a series of miscarriages places that desire frustratingly out of reach. Then one day a boat washes up on the shore, carrying a dead man and… a live baby. If Tom and Isabel keep the little girl, who’d be any the wiser? The couple faces a fateful choice that will alter their lives, and others as well.

With its elegiac shots of the wine-dark sea and a swooning soundtrack heavy on woodwinds and strings, the drama sets out for romance, seriousness, and pathos. But scenes that drag, clunky foreshadowing contrivances, and thudding expository dialogue take the wind out of the movie’s sails. So do some puzzling choices made by the movie’s main characters, Tom in particular.

Vikander delivers a strong if not especially subtle performance as a heedless, girlish young woman. Fassbender seems wooden by comparison, but in fairness, it’s hard to tell whether his performance actually falls short or just holds true to a man of few words, sealed off by war trauma and a terrible secret.

The Light Between Oceans very, very much wants us to care about the plight of its characters, and what starts as an austere, deterministic if slightly earnest morality tale devolves into a manipulative tearjerker. As the mother whose child was essentially stolen by the lighthouse couple, Rachel Weisz brings a watchful, nuanced portrayal of a woman in torment that rises above the melodrama around her. Her presence is a memorable part of a movie that, for all its stirring scenery and desire to awaken big emotions, remains oddly still in the water.