They try to understand how a God who seeks and promises their happiness could ask them “to bring suffering on ourselves. But too often Malick resorts to familiar soaring shots of fog smoking off the mountains, or vertiginous camera movements that swoop in and out for no apparent reason. He gives us brief moments of specific sweetness, like Franz balancing a rifle on his foot or Fani pretending to smoke wheat with her sister. Malick is masterful at showing people working in nature-all the sowing and threshing scenes are powerful, evoking both the painful beauty of this life and the divine harvest yet to come. Similarly, the town’s mayor exists only to make villainous speeches attacking immigrants.

The indistinguishable Jägerstätter daughters exist solely to raise the stakes of their father’s choices. This decision adds to the atmosphere of lugubrious fable-and suggests that some characters are people whereas others are merely circumstances. The villagers yell untranslated slurs at Fani, the guards at a Nazi prison shout untranslated commands. In many other scenes, the cast speaks untranslated German. It is also one obvious way of representing prayer, and several voice-overs are explicitly addressed to God. This allows an increasingly sharp contrast between the calm words and the violent events on screen. Much of the movie’s dialogue is actually voice-over. Malick is masterful at showing people working in nature. Several aspects of Jägerstätter’s life that don’t make it into the film could have added both specificity and poignancy, like his childhood poverty, or his daughter born out of wedlock before he met Fani (we get only one vague allusion to his wild youth). “A Hidden Life” falls far on the side of the general rather than the specific, in ways that damage the film’s political vision and its insight into character. Their marriage is the foundation of their lives, their arms intertwining as the camera lingers on their wedding rings.Īny fictionalized hagiography has to balance the specific details of this life with the meaning it may hold for others. The film’s first hour sets up an idyll in the Austrian farmhouse owned by Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner). The “hidden life” of the title is not solely Jägerstätter’s but God’s.

In a time when even Christians often justify our religion on the grounds that it produces measurable outcomes like stable families or feelings of personal happiness, Malick gives us martyrdom: a protest against, among other things, positive outcome measurements. With “A Hidden Life,” the writer and director Terrence Malick set himself a bold and perhaps impossible task: using all the visual resources of film to represent faith itself, “evidence of things not seen.” This nearly three-hour hagiography of the Nazi resister Blessed Franz Jägerstätter refuses any visible success.

A hidden life