✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United States, Germany · 2019
2h 54m
Director Terrence Malick
Starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon, Karin Neuhäuser
Genre Drama, War, History
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The Austrian Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector, refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II and is executed by them in 1943. Opening at Jägerstätter’s home in Austria’s countryside, the film follows Franz and his wife, Fani, along their path of resistance. Told through real wartime letters, this love story finds the couple in conflict with the members of their close-knit town, their church, their government, and even their friends — all of which brings them to a dramatic choice.
The Tree of Life spanned eons to capture the entirety of existence, and while the filmmaker works on a tighter four-year canvas this time around, the feeling that the stakes are nothing less than the soul of all humanity has persisted. This is art of salvation.
Maybe Malick has committed so hard to his own principles, artistic as well as ideological, that he’s lost his grasp on drama. I’d love to see him step out of the church he’s built around his work and give us the world again, with or without a script.
A Hidden Life is a lucid and profoundly defiant portrait of faith in crisis.
Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang
Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.
The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi
A Hidden Life is an invocation, the wrenching and unheeded plea of a man struggling to preserve his humanity intact as the world around him plunges deeper into evil, and worse, watches motionless and indifferent as said evil blossoms, spreads, and becomes normalized.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.
Whether or not he is specifically referring to the present day, its demagogues, and the way certain evangelicals have once again sold out their core values for political advantage, “A Hidden Life” feels stunningly relevant as it thrusts this problem into the light.
Terrence Malick often wrestles with the cosmic, the spiritual and the eternal, but with A Hidden Life, the meditative writer-director attacks his usual themes from a rewardingly timely and urgent perspective.
A sombre spiritual war epic which surges up to claim its place among the director’s most deeply felt, sturdily hewn achievements.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.
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