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Terrence Malick ’s “A Hidden Life,” the true story of a World War II conscientious objector, is one of his finest films, and one of his most demanding. It clocks in at nearly three hours, moves in a measured way (you could call the pacing “a stroll"), and requires a level of concentration and openness to philosophical conundrums and random moments that most modern films don’t even bother asking for. It also feels like as much of a career summation as Martin Scorsese ’s “ The Irishman ,” combining stylistic elements from across Malick’s nearly 50-year filmography, somehow channeling both the ghastly humor and rooted in actual scenes (with beginnings and endings) that longtime fans remember from his early classics “ Badlands ” and “ Days of Heaven ,” and the whirling, fast-cut, montages-with-voiceover style that he embraced in the latter part of his career. It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

August Diehl stars as Franz Jägerstätter, a modest, real-life hero of a type rarely celebrated on film. He wasn’t a politician, a revolutionary firebrand, or even a particularly extroverted or even verbose man. He just had a set of beliefs and stuck with them to the bitter end. Living a life that oddly echoed Herman Mellville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” this was a soft-spoken Catholic who refused to serve in the German army, swear a loyalty oath to Hitler, or respond in kind when people said “Heil Hitler” to him on the road. As a result, he suffered an escalating series of consequences that were meant to break him but hardened his resolve. 

There was only one way that this story could end, as fascist dictatorships don’t take kindly to citizens refusing to do as they’re told. Franz Jägerstätter was inspired by Franz Reinisch, a Catholic priest who was executed for refusing to swear allegiance to Hitler, and decided he was willing to go out the same way if it came to that. It came to that. 

The film begins in 1939, with a newsreel montage establishing Hitler’s consolidation of power. Franz lives in the small German Alpine village of St. Radegund with his wife Franziska, nicknamed “Fani” (Valerie Pancher), and their younger daughters, eking out a meager living cutting fields, baling hay, and raising livestock. Franz is drafted into the German army but doesn’t see combat. When he’s called up again—in 1943, at which point he and his wife have children, and Germany has conquered several countries, killed millions, and begun to undertake a campaign of genocide that the German people were either keenly or dimly aware of—Franz decides his conscience won’t permit him to serve in combat. He objects to war generally, but this one in particular.

It’s not an easy decision to make, and Malick’s film gives us a piercing sense of what it costs him. The effect on Franz's marriage is complex: apparently he was an apolitical person until he met Fani, and became principled and staunch after marrying her. Now she’s in the agonizing position of suggesting that Franz not put into action the same values he’s proud of having absorbed from her, and that she’s proud of having taught him by way of example. If Franz sticks to his guns, so to speak, he’ll end up in jail, tortured, maybe dead, depriving her of a husband, their children of a father, and the household of income, and subjecting the remains of their family to public scorn by villagers who worship Hitler like a God, and treat anyone who refuses to idolize him as a heretic that deserves jail or death. 

The situation is one that a lesser film would milk for easy feelings of moral superiority—it’s a nice farmer vs. the Nazis, after all, and who doesn’t want to fantasize that they would have been this brave in the same predicament?—but “A Hidden Life” isn’t interested in push-button morality. Instead, in the manner of a theologian or philosophy professor, it uses its story as a springboard for questions meant to spark introspection in viewers. Such as: Is it morally acceptable to allow one’s spouse and children to suffer by sticking to one’s beliefs? Is that what’s really best for the family, for society, for the self? Is it even possible to be totally consistent while carrying out noble, defiant acts? Is it a sin to act in self-preservation? Which self-preserving acts are acceptable, and which are defined as cowardice?

We see other people trying to talk Franz into giving up, and there's often a hint that his willingness to suffer makes them feel guilt about their preference for comfort. When Franz discusses his situation early in the story with the local priest, he’s not-too-subtly warned that it’s a bad idea to oppose the state, and that most religious leaders support Hitler; the priest seems genuinely concerned about Franz and his family, but there's also a hint of self-excoriation in his troubled face. A long, provocative scene towards the middle of the movie—by which point Franz is in military jail, regularly being humiliated and abused by guards trying to break him—a lawyer asks Franz if it really matters that he’s not carrying a rifle and wearing a uniform when he still has to shine German soldiers’ shoes and fill up their sandbags. Everywhere Franz turns, he encounters people who agree with him and say they are rooting for him but can’t or won’t take the additional step of publicly refusing to yield to the the Nazi tide. 

The film’s generosity of spirit is so great that it even allows some of the Nazis to experience moments of doubt, even though they’re never translated into positive action—as when a judge (the late, great Bruno Ganz , in one of his final roles) invites Franz into his office, questions him about his decisions, and thinks hard about them, with a disturbed expression. After Franz gets up from his chair and leaves the room, the judge takes his seat and looks at his hands on his knees, as if trying to imagine being Franz. 

That, of course, is the experience of “A Hidden Life,” a film that puts us deep inside of a situation and examines it in human terms, rather than treating it a set of easy prompts for feeling morally superior to some of the vilest people in history. What’s important here is not just what happened, but what the hero and his loved ones were feeling while it happened, and the questions they were thinking and arguing about as time marched on. 

What makes this story an epic, beyond the fact of its running time, is the extraordinary attention that the writer-director and his cast and crew pay to the mundane context surrounding the hero’s choices. As is always the case in Malick’s work, “A Hidden Life” notes the physical details of existence, whether it’s the rhythmic movements of scythes cutting grass in a field, the shadows left on walls by sunlight passing through trees, or the way a young sleeping child’s legs and feet dangle as her father carries her. In a manner reminiscent of “Days of Heaven,” a great film about labor, Malick repeatedly returns to the ritualized action of work—behind bars or in the village—letting simple tasks play out in longer takes without music (and sometimes without cuts), and giving us a sense of how personal political struggles are integrated into the ordinariness of life. 

There are countless fleeting moments that are heartbreaking because they’re so recognizable, and in some cases so odd yet mysteriously and undeniably real, such as the scene where Franz, in military custody, stops at a cafe with two captors and, on his way out, straightens an umbrella propped against the doorway. Moments later, there’s a shot from Franz’s point-of-view in the backseat of a car, the open window framing one of his escorts doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk—something he probably does all the time whether he’s wearing a Nazi uniform or plainclothes. 

Franz Rogowski , the star of " Transit ," has a small, wrenching role as Waldlan, a fellow soldier who also becomes a conscientious objector. With an economy that’s dazzling, Rogowski and Malick establish the profound gentleness of this man, with his sad, dark eyes and soft voice, and an imagination that leads him to monologue on red and and white wine, and pose two straw men meant for bayonet practice as if they were Malickian lovers necking in a field. Every minute brings a new revelation, nearly always snuck into a scene sideways or through a back door, its full power registering in hindsight. Not a day has passed since first seeing this film that I haven't thought about the moment when a prisoner who's about to be executed turns to a man standing next to him, indicates the clipboard, paper and pen that he's been given for last words, and asks, "What do I write?"

The film also shows regular citizens identifying with government bullies, and getting a thrill from inflicting terror and pain on helpless targets. The closest Malick, a New Testament sort of storyteller, comes to outright condemnation is when “A Hidden Life” shows German soldiers (often appallingly young) getting up in Franz’s face, insulting and belittling or physically abusing him with a sneering gusto that only appears when a bully knows that his target can’t fight back. (“Schindler’s List” was also astute about this.) There's an unexpectedly elating quality to the red-faced impotence of Nazis screaming at Franz while he's bound up at gunpoint, cursing him and insisting that his protests mean nothing. If they mean nothing, why are these men screaming?

The phenomenon of ordinary citizens investing their pride, their sense of self-worth, and (in the case of men) their fantasy of machismo in the person of a single government figure is one that many nations, including the United States, understand well. Malick doesn’t give interviews, but I don’t think we’d need one to understand why he would release a film like this in 2019, at a time when the United States is being torn apart over the issue of obedient support of an authority figure, and have the dialogue alternate German with English. But the film is rich and sturdy enough to transcend the contemporary one-to-one comparisons that it is sure to invite—and it’s not as if we haven’t seen this scenario elsewhere, before and after World War II, or will never see it again. The social dynamics presented here are timeless.

And yet, improbably, “A Hidden Life” is a tragic story that doesn’t play solely as a tragedy. The misery endured by Franz, Fani and their children is presented as a more extreme version of the pain everyone suffers as the byproduct of life on earth. The rumbling buzz of bombers passing over the village are of a piece with the arrival of the American warships in Malick's " The Thin Red Line " to take Pvt. Witt away from his pacifist paradise and into the war zone, and the English galleons signaling the impending colonization of Powhatan lands in " The New World ," and the shots of cops and Pinkertons creeping up on the fugitive heroes of "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" just when they were able to lose themselves in personal paradise. 

Did God create suffering, and evil? If so, why? And why do suffering and evil inflict themselves arbitrarily and unequally? Is the test of endurance and faith the point of injustice and pain? If so, is that point a defensible one? Why be moral at all if morality can be neutered by force, and the powerful are immune to consequences that sting the rest of us? 

Malick offers no answers. As Fani tells us near the end of the tale, all questions will be answered in time. 

So we wait. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

A Hidden Life (2019)

Rated PG-13 for thematic material including violent images.

173 minutes

August Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter

Valerie Pachner as Franziska Jägerstätter

Michael Nyqvist as Bishop Joseph Fliessen

Matthias Schoenaerts as Herder

Jürgen Prochnow as Major Schlegel

Bruno Ganz as Richter

Alexander Fehling as Fredrich Feldmann

Ulrich Matthes as Lorenz Schwaninger

• Terrence Malick

Cinematographer

• Jörg Widmer
• Rehman Nizar Ali
• Sebastian Jones
• Joe Gleason
• James Newton Howard

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‘A Hidden Life’ Review: Refusing Hitler, Embracing Beauty

Terrence Malick’s film telling the story of an Austrian farmer’s heroic defiance of the Nazis is gorgeous and at times frustrating.

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By A.O. Scott

Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian farmer at the center of “A Hidden Life,” finds himself in a lot of arguments. He isn’t an especially contentious man — on the contrary, his manner is generally amiable and serene. But he has done something that people in his village and beyond find provocative, which is to refuse combat service in World War II. He won’t take the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler that is required of every Austrian soldier.

Since this is a film by Terrence Malick, the arguments don’t take the usual stagy, back-and-forth, expository form. The words, in English and unsubtitled German, slide across the action, overlapping scenes, fading in and out, trailing off into music or the sounds of nature. At issue is not only Franz’s future — he risks a death sentence if he persists in his refusal — but also the meaning of his action.

Most of the men (and they are mostly men) who try to dissuade him act in some degree of complicity with the Nazis. The mayor of St. Radegund, the mountain hamlet where Franz lives, is a true believer, spouting xenophobic, master-race rhetoric in the town’s beer garden. The Roman Catholic clergy — Franz visits the local priest and a nearby bishop — counsel quiet and compromise. Interrogators, bureaucrats and lawyers, including Franz’s defense attorney, try to make him see reason. His stubbornness won’t change anything, they say, and will only hurt his family. His actions are selfish and vain, his sacrifice pointless.

And Franz (August Diehl) is not the only one who suffers. He is imprisoned, first in a rural jail and then in Berlin’s Tegel prison. Some of the words we hear on the soundtrack are drawn from the letters that pass between him and his wife, Franziska (Valerie Pachner). She stays behind to tend the farm with her sister and mother-in-law, and also to endure the hostility of the neighbors. The film is divided between Franz’s and Franziska’s points of view, and returns to images of them together with their three daughters against a backdrop of fields and mountains — pictures of everyday life and also of an earthly paradise that can withstand human evil.

The arresting visual beauty of “A Hidden Life,” which was shot by Joerg Widmer, is essential to its own argument, and to Franz’s ethical and spiritual rebuttal to the concerns of his persecutors and would-be allies. The topography of the valley is spectacular, but so are the churches and cathedrals. Even the cells and offices are infused with an aesthetic intensity at once sensual and picturesque. The hallmarks of Malick’s later style are here: the upward tilt of the camera to capture new vistas of sky and landscape; the brisk gliding along rivers and roads; the elegant cutting between the human and natural worlds; the reverence for music and the mistrust of speech. (The score is by James Newton Howard.)

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Review: ‘A Hidden Life’ is Terrence Malick’s strongest film in nearly a decade

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It may not surprise you to learn that “A Hidden Life,” the new film written and directed by Terrence Malick, begins with a voiceover over a black screen. “I thought that we could build our nest high up,” a man intones in a near-whisper, “like birds, in the mountains.” What comes next, though, is surprising: an image of flight that has nothing to do with birds. A German warplane soars above the clouds, then dips low enough to cast a shadow over a city where a march is in progress. We are watching 1930s propaganda footage of a Nazi rally, complete with a shot of Hitler taking the stage, rigid and unsmiling even before a triumphant crowd.

This is not, to say the least, your typical Malick opener. Within moments he will revert to form, enfolding the audience in a lush cinematic pastoral, set to the keening strings of a gorgeous James Newton Howard score. Here, in the Austrian farming village of St. Radegund, are the expected vistas of astonishing natural beauty, the misty mountains and waterfalls towering over a secluded 20th century Eden. Here too are a latter-day Adam and Eve, a married couple named Franz and Fani (August Diehl and Valerie Pachner), sharpening their scythes, tending their livestock and clinging to each other and their young children in an affecting pantomime of domestic harmony.

But another plane will soon fly over St. Radegund, drawing Fani’s troubled gaze skyward before the first of many ominous fades to black. Sometime later, in 1940, Franz will be called up for military training, separating him for a spell from his family. But unlike his fellow soldiers, Franz goes about his duties with little enthusiasm and a growing sense of doubt. When he returns home, he and Fani embrace each other so forcefully that they tumble into the grass — a blissful reunion that both will cling to as they silently join forces against the fascist tide sweeping across their country.

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.

Franz is a fictionalized stand-in for Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian peasant farmer and devout Catholic who became a conscientious objector, refused to fight for Germany during World War II and was imprisoned and executed in 1943. His courage would be worth memorializing in any year, as it was in 2007, when he was named a martyr by Pope Benedict XVI. But it feels particularly resonant now, at a moment when so many political and religious leaders, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have done their part to foster a global resurgence in white supremacy, right-wing nationalism and anti-immigrant violence. And 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.

“If God gives us free will, we’re responsible for what we do or what we fail to do, aren’t we?” Franz asks a local bishop. “If our leaders are not good, if they’re evil, what does one do?” The bishop coldly replies that he owes his unswerving allegiance to the Fatherland, but Franz is wise enough not to mistake the clergyman’s voice for God’s. As his doubts manifest themselves in small acts of defiance — refusing to donate money to the war effort, rebuking the local refrain of “Heil Hitler” — he and his wife become pariahs, scorned and attacked by their fellow villagers and taken to task by some of their own family, including Franz’s stern mother (Karin Neuhäuser) and Fani’s sympathetic sister (Maria Simon).

Like a lot of American filmmakers fictionalizing a real-life story, Malick is not overly concerned with strict historic accuracy or, for that matter, linguistic verisimilitude. (Diehl is German and Pachner is Austrian; both speak nearly all their dialogue in English.) Unlike a lot of American filmmakers, he paints with sweeping impressionist brushstrokes and seeks to distill internal states into outward gestures. He treats Franz and Fani’s existence as a three-dimensional canvas through which the camera is free to roam and ruminate, weaving shards of experience and memory into a fragmented but linear narrative. (The breathtakingly intimate cinematography is by Jörg Widmer, the expansive editing by Rehman Nizar Ali, Joe Gleason and Sebastian Jones.)

The title of “A Hidden Life” is a reference to a line from “Middlemarch,” and if Malick is not exactly the cinematic equivalent of George Eliot, he is no less devoted to illuminating and exalting moments that could easily be mistaken for unremarkable. What can be singled out as unremarkable, after all, from a life that cumulatively turned out to be so extraordinary? Jägerstätter’s spiritual convictions, Malick seems to reaffirm with every shot, were inextricable from the material privations and emotional riches that constituted his everyday reality.

And so while “A Hidden Life” may consist of nearly three hours’ worth of anguished theological brooding, it is also, no less important, a patient record of midcentury farm life, an ode to the joys and pains of manual labor and, above all, a moving evocation of a family’s resilient love. Malick finds a transporting loveliness in images and exchanges that another filmmaker might have dismissed as banal: in the baking of bread and the milking of cows, in the steady flow of a babbling brook and the way a toddler’s legs dangle after she’s fallen asleep in her father’s arms.

[‘A Hidden Life’] is a poem and a polemic, an exploratory independent drama and a varnished Hollywood epic, a bold, even visionary work that is not without its compromises.

In time, Franz is called up for military service and, after some argument with Fani and others, decides to report for duty so that he can declare his refusal to fight for the Nazi cause. His rationale is clear and simple — “We have to stand up to evil,” he says — and from there, “A Hidden Life” proceeds to show, with painful attenuation, the consequences of such a moral stand. What we see could easily be mistaken for a documentary on wartime incarceration, so attentively does Malick re-create the ambiance of the prison yard where Franz plays games with his fellow inmates, or the cell where he is taunted and tortured by a guard. In these passages, you begin to feel the tedium of waiting, the unbearable weight of Franz’s long journey to martyrdom, which could be a sign of Malick’s self-indulgence, a testament to his expressive gifts or both.

“A Hidden Life” is replete with such contradictions. It’s a poem and a polemic, an exploratory independent drama and a varnished Hollywood epic, a bold, even visionary work that is not without its compromises. For those of us who have long admired Malick, even during his trying recent forays into contemporary ennui ( “Knight of Cups,” “Song to Song” ), it’s thrilling to see him return to the historical period that gave rise to one of his finest works, “The Thin Red Line,” and emerge with an antiwar narrative that sincerely embodies its subject’s pacifism. But if “A Hidden Life” is indeed this director’s return to form — his best film since his masterful “Tree of Life,” which it resembles in more than a few respects — it might also be the most frustratingly great movie I’ve seen this year.

Malick’s aesthetic flourishes — the impeccably focus-pulled tracking shots, the mighty blasts of Bach and Dvorak on the soundtrack — can feel revelatory at times and pro forma at others. In a picture that stretches toward three hours, the notable omission of any mention of the persecution of the Jews smacks not of denialism but of incuriosity, and it feels like a missed opportunity. For all the emotional acuity and transparency of the performances by Diehl and especially Pachner, I blanched at the sound of both actors speaking English — a commercial calculation, perhaps, but one that seems all the more dubious given that the Nazi characters bark at each other in German.

But if “A Hidden Life” falls short of sublimity, the troubling, powerful lesson it has to impart — the rarity of real goodness in the face of collective evil — is not so easily diminished. Nor is there any mistaking the gravity and authority of its challenge to the viewer. In one of the most piercing scenes, Franz seeks counsel from a religious artist who mournfully acknowledges how few Christians, himself included, understand what it means to actually follow Jesus, who commanded his followers to lay down their lives out of love.

“I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo over his head,” the painter says. “Someday, I’ll paint the true Christ.” Malick, whose next film will be about the life of Jesus, clearly hopes to do the same. But after seeing “A Hidden Life,” I can’t help but wonder if, in some imperfect yet indelible way, he already has.

‘A Hidden Life’

Rating: PG-13, for thematic material including violent images Running time: 2 hours, 54 minutes Playing: Arclight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles

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Film Review: ‘A Hidden Life’

Back in Cannes with his best film since 'The Tree of Life,' Terrence Malick poses tough questions about personal faith in a world gone astray in this epic return to form.

By Peter Debruge

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There are no battlefields in Terrence Malick ’s “ A Hidden Life ” — only fields of wheat — no concentration-camp horrors, no dramatic midnight raids. But make no mistake: This is a war movie; it’s just that the fight that’s raging here is an internal one, between a Christian and his conscience. A refulgent return to form from one of cinema’s vital auteurs, “A Hidden Life” pits the righteous against the Reich, and puts personal integrity over National Socialism, focusing on the true story of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter’s rejection of Adolf Hitler and his refusal to serve in what he sees as an unjust war.

And lest that sound like more flower-power finger-painting from a director whose oeuvre can sometimes feel like a parody of itself, consider this: Without diminishing the millions of lives lost during World War II, Malick makes a case for rethinking the stakes of that conflict — echoes of which can hardly be ignored in contemporary politics — in more personal terms. Here, it is the fate of one man’s soul that’s at play, and nearly three hours of screen time doesn’t seem the slightest bit excessive when it comes to capturing the sacrifice of Franz (German actor August Diehl), who was ostracized, imprisoned, and ultimately executed for his convictions.

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Over the past decade — during which Malick made his Palme d’Or-winning magnum opus, “The Tree of Life”; whispery self-doubt drama “To the Wonder”; and cost-of-celebrity critique “Knight of Cups” and its music-world equivalent, “Song to Song” — has any filmmaker delved deeper in exploring, and ultimately exorcizing, his own demons? With the benefit of hindsight, those four features represent a cycle of increasingly avant-garde, if ebbingly effective semi-autibiographical projects. By contrast, “A Hidden Life” brings Malick back to the realm of more traditional, linear narrative, while extending his impulse to give as much weight to wildlife and the weather as he does to human concerns.

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Better suited to the director’s adherents than the uninitiated, “A Hidden Life” could be seen as a continuation of themes raised in 1998’s “The Thin Red Line,” which also took place during WWII, albeit halfway around the world. In that then-radical tone poem, Malick focused on how ill-suited a group of American infantrymen were to the role of combat, melding their interior monologues and interchangeable faces in tragic tribute to the waste of innocence that is war. By contrast, “A Hidden Life” depicts the proactive decision a single would-be soldier makes not to yield to the boiling bloodlust, but instead to follow what the director has previously dubbed “the way of grace.”

Though it privileges the voices of multiple characters — by now, a Malick signature — there can be no question that Franz represents the film’s hero. Delivering his lines in mostly unaccented English rather than his native German, Diehl carries the film despite being largely unknown to American audiences (he played a smug SS officer in “Inglourious Basterds,” and here represents the opposite), relying more on body language and what goes unspoken behind his eyes than on the film’s typically sparse dialogue. Still, Franz is not a conventional Western protagonist in the sense that his story is defined not by his actions but by choices — and specifically, the things he doesn’t do.

“A Hidden Life” introduces this salt-of-the-earth Aryan tending the land with his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), high on the slopes of St. Radegund, a bucolic West Austrian town. To the extent that all of Malick’s films represent the notion of Eden interrupted, this setting feels particularly primeval. “How simple life was then,” the couple recall — though the sentiment hardly bears articulating when they are shown picking wildflowers and playing games with their three daughters. Then, in 1940, Franz is called to the nearby Ennis Military Base, where he and a fellow trainee (Franz Rogowski) find amusement among the military drills.

The point of these exercises is to prepare the young men for combat, although Franz refuses to swear his allegiance to Hitler, or to support the war effort in any way. When he is called to serve, Franz instead goes to the town priest (Tobias Moretti) seeking help, only to discover that the church he respected has become complicit in the crime of “killing innocent people.” In truth, Father Fürthauer had been appointed to his post after an earlier priest was ousted after giving an anti-Nazi sermon, and could hardly be relied upon to oppose the new regime.

Appealing to the bishop (Michael Nyqvist, the first of several major Euro stars glimpsed only for a couple minutes), Franz argues, “If God gives us free will, we are responsible for what we do” — and just as importantly, “what we don’t do.” Despite its epic running time, the movie doesn’t bog down in the details, or else we’d learn that Franz was the only person in St. Radegund to oppose the Anschluss — or peaceful annexation of Austria by the Fatherland — a vote of daring personal opposition that was never reported. It’s worth mentioning here because that early stand already revealed the extent to which his community was allowing fear to poison its judgment, driving the groupthink that made Franz feel like an outcast among his own people.

Once Franz makes his oppositional position known, those who might have once been his friends turn on his family. In one scene, a pack of local kids throw mud at his daughters, and later, after Franz is sent away to Berlin’s Tegel prison, neighbors spit at Fani in the road. Where other storytellers might exaggerate such cruelty, Malick doesn’t overplay such slights — and even contrasts them at times, as when an elderly woman stops to help Fani collect what’s spilled from her broken wagon, a gesture of kindness that outweighs even the sadistic behavior shown by Franz’s Nazi guards elsewhere in the film. Till the end, and at great personal cost, Fani supports her husband, while nearly everyone (including Matthias Schoenaerts and Bruno Ganz in brief appearances) seeks to spare his life at the expense of his soul.

Working with a mostly new team of artisans, Malick leans on DP Jörg Widmer (who worked alongside Emmanuel Lubezki on “The Tree of Life”) for the film’s intense short-lens anamorphic widescreen look, which distorts whatever appears anywhere other than dead center in frame. Since the director likes to place his characters off-axis, expecting audiences to reorient themselves with every jump cut, this creates — and sustains — a surreal, dreamlike feel for his longest film yet (not counting director’s cuts). This heightened visual style contrasts the rigorously authentic costumes (by Lisy Christl) and sets (from Sebastian T. Krawinkel, rather than career-long collaborator Jack Fisk), while composer James Newton Howard lends ambience and depth between a mix of heavenly choirs and meditative classical pieces.

Don’t let the period setting fool you. While “The Tree of Life” may have felt more grand — and how could it not, with that cosmic 16-minute creation sequence parked in the middle of the film — “A Hidden Life” actually grapples with bigger, more pressing universal issues. Between “Days of Heaven” (Malick’s first masterpiece) and “The Thin Red Line,” the director disappeared from cinema for 20 years. Since his return, his work has been infused with questions of faith, putting him up there with Carl Theodor Dreyer as one of the few film artists to engage seriously with religion, which so often is ignored or dismissed by others despite its prominence in society.

In this film, Malick draws a critical distinction between faith and religion, calling out the failing of the latter — a human institution that’s as fallible and corruptible as any individual. At one point, Franz goes to a local chapel and speaks to the cynical old artisan (Johan Leysen) restoring the damaged paintings on its walls. “A darker time is coming, and men will be more clever,” the man tells him. “They don’t confront the truth. They just ignore it.” In recent years, Malick may have seemed out of touch, responding to issues that interest him more than the public at large. But 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.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition), May 19, 2019. Running time: 174 MIN.

• Production: (Germany-U.S.) An Elizabeth Bay Prods. presentation, in association with Aceway, Mister Smith of a Studio Babelsberg production. (Int'l sales: Mister Smith Entertainment, London.) Producers: Grant Hill, Dario Bergesio, Josh Jeter, Elisabeth Bentley. Executive producers: Marcus Loges, Adam Morgan, Bill Pohlad, Yi Wei, Christoph Fisser, Henning Molfenter, Charlie Woebcken.
• Crew: Director, writer: Terrence Malick. Camera (color, widescreen): Jörg Widmer. Editors: Rehman Niza, Joe Gleason, Sebastian Jones. Music: James Newton Howard.  
• With: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner , Maria Simon, Tobias Moretti, Bruno Ganz, Matthias Schoenaerts, Karin Neuhäuser, Ulrich Matthes. (English, German dialogue)

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A Hidden Life

The Austrian Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector, refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II. The Austrian Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector, refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II. The Austrian Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector, refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II.

• Terrence Malick
• August Diehl
• Valerie Pachner
• Maria Simon
• 287 User reviews
• 221 Critic reviews
• 80 Metascore
• 8 wins & 27 nominations

Top cast 68

• Franz Jägerstätter

• Fani Jägerstätter

• Resie Schwaninger
• Rosalia Jägerstätter

• Fr. Fürthauer

• Lorenz Schwaninger

• Captain Herder

• Mayor Kraus
• (as Karl Marvocics)

• Judge Lueben

• Bishop Fliesser

• Trakl, the Miller

• Ohlendorf, the Painter

• Warder Stein

• Aunt Walburga

• Lawyer Feldman
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Terrence Malick spent almost three years editing this film.

Closing Title Card : ...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. -George Eliot

• Crazy credits The title card at the end of the picture comes from the final sentence of George Eliot's "Middlemarch".
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: 'Faster than your First Time' Reviews (Joker, Jojo Rabbit, Lucy in the Sky and everything else) (2019)
• Soundtracks St Matthew Passion, BWV 244, Kommt, ihr Töchter Written by Johann Sebastian Bach Performed by Bach-Collegium Stuttgart (as Bach Collegium Stuttgart) and Gächinger Kantorei (as Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart) with Helmuth Rilling Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment (Germany) GmbH By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 287

• Oct 26, 2019
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• Was "A Hidden Life" not released in time to qualify for nominations at the 2020 Oscars?
• Does anyone know where the beautifully ornate church is located in?
• January 17, 2020 (United Kingdom)
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Fox Searchlight
• Mister Smith Entertainment
• Một Đời Ẩn Giấu
• St. Radegund, Upper Austria, Austria
• Fox Searchlight Pictures
• TSG Entertainment
• Elizabeth Bay Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Dec 15, 2019

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 54 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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• What Is Cinema?

Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life Is Strange and Grand

There’s something unusually powerful about A Hidden Life , Terrence Malick’s spacious new chronicle of the conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter, whose refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler and the Third Reich—a requirement of every Austrian soldier called to serve during World War II—resulted in his execution in 1943.

That’s not exactly a spoiler. Jägerstätter was declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church in 2007. And the film itself, which eventually proves suspenseful in the way that only the dread of a foregone conclusion can feel suspenseful, never obscures the nature of this conflict. It never obscures that Jägerstätter’s tussle with Nazi ideology is a fight that can only end in death—whether of the man’s principles or of the man himself.

However, A Hidden Life opens not with despair, nor even war, but with plentitude: a rapturous sense of agrarian life and work, the tremendous freedom of the Austrian countryside, the trembling affections of young people in love. It is 1939 and Franz ( August Diehl ) and his wife, Fani ( Valerie Pachner ), have made a live for themselves in the valley of St. Radegund, a small village in Upper Austria—Franz’s birthplace. They’ve got three young daughters in tow, plus Fani’s unmarried sister and Franz’s widowed mother. The film opens with an air of nostalgia: a sense that the life onscreen is a life, a freedom, to which these people would never return.

Malick being Malick, these emotive opening scenes are of course beautiful. Scythes sweeping in sync; hills rolling far off into the horizon. His favored cinematographer of late, Emmanuel Lubezki , didn’t work on this project; filling in is Jörg Widmer , who has worked as a camera operator on Malick’s films since 2005’s A New World and, accordingly, has a handle on the director’s fluid and often circumspect style. “I thought that we could build our nest high up in the trees,” says Franz in the first of the film’s sprawling voiceovers—a Malick trademark that heightens and personalizes, rather than merely adorning and prettifying, his roving images. “Fly away like the birds to the mountains.”

The rapture of it all survives Franz’s first bit of military duty in 1940, after the nation has entered war and men like Franz are called upon to train. It survives the surrender of France, too, which lulls the villagers into the reckless hope that the war will soon be over. “It seemed no trouble could reach our valley,” Fani tells us in hushed tones. “We lived above the clouds.” And then, among the actual clouds, signs of what’s to come: far-off war planes flying overhead. Broadcasts of Hitler’s voice that echo through the valley at night.

A Hidden Life is strange, an uncanny mix of everything that has made Malick’s style recognizable (and maybe, depending on you, infuriating) since The Tree of Life —all those non-scenes and their overtly physical displays of feeling, those voice-overs that are at times explicitly epistolary but otherwise feel like confessions to God—with these uncanny intrusions of World War II footage and images of Hitler, of marches, of encroaching crisis. A Hidden Life has a grand (this being Malick), totalizing subject at its core: nothing less than the rise of pure evil, evil that travels with such political force that even the church, Franz is chagrined to learn, cowers at the risk of condemning it.

The seat of Franz’s objection—the reason he refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler, incurring the wrath and isolation of his fellow villagers, down to even the mayor—is that Hitler, he believes, is the anti-Christ. Of course, in political terms, disloyalty to Hitler is disloyalty to the nation. It is impossible. To which home does Franz swear his fidelity: Austria, or God? When the implications of Franz’s political betrayal begin to have real force, A Hidden Life shifts. It becomes a story of incarceration (and something of an endurance test, accordingly), tracking Franz’s long imprisonment and psychological decay—none of which deter him from what he believes—as, back home, his family suffers the consequences of his abstention.

The film never obscures what it’s about. This is, after all, the story of a martyr. But because it’s recounted by a director whose cosmic visions are deliberately meted out through the most minute details, things most other films overlook—the ephemera of everyday experience, the gestures, glances, and sudden flights of feeling that define us without our even recognizing them in the moment—it all feels that much more particular. The secret to late period Malick, for me, has been realizing that you already know their rituals, their stories. You know what to expect for Franz’s family back home, while he’s gone; you recognize the signs and symptoms of their social isolation early on. And you know to expect that Franz will suffer violence in those dirty cells, that his resistance will gradually be worn down to a nub, that he will have doubts. All of which helps, because what Malick's films then provide are all the conflicting, ingenious colors therein, the subtleties lurking within each stroke of the brush.

It’s the way Malick makes you see it that matters—and maybe, in this case, sticking closer to a script than usual (if that’s true; it’s hard for even a Malick fan to imagine) helped. Since at least 2017, Malick has claimed that this film, which was originally titled Radegund , would be a return to a slightly more straightforward style of filmmaking. “Lately—I keep insisting, only very lately—have I been working without a script and I’ve lately repented the idea,” he said when A Hidden Life was still in post-production . “The last picture we shot, and we’re now cutting, went back to a script that was very well ordered.”

Hence A Hidden Life ’s clear, rhythmic structure, which anchors its ideas about the spirit and political will in even broader characterizations than usual. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad—if only everyone could agree on which is which. This is a political film in a sense; the time of its release is of course suggestive, and so is the fact that its distributor, Fox Searchlight, is the studio responsible for the year’s other major Hitler movie, Jojo Rabbit . Really, though, it's about something much more base, anterior to politics. It's about faith, pure and simple—though, in the end, A Hidden Life is anything but.

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Premiering in competition, Terrence Malick's latest film 'A Hidden Life' tells the true story of Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian conscientious objector during World War II.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Since Terrence Malick won the Palme d’Or at Cannes eight years ago for The Tree of Life, he has, after a fashion, run the count to two strikes and a foul ball with To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song. Well, it’s a big swing and a miss for strike three with A Hidden Life , which sees the massively talented but often mystifying writer-director take on true-life material for the first time in this desperately indulgent and puzzlingly de-theologized study of an Austrian man who paid the ultimate price for his conscientious objector stance against the Nazis during World War II.

As beautiful as it is to look at on a big wide screen, this lustrous, independently produced three-hour indulgence will struggle to find much footing in theatrical release, at least in the U.S., which will ironically relegate this high-calorie slice of art film extravagance mostly to the home screen.

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Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them. Of course, when you’ve got the Nazis as the villains, there’s scarcely any dramatic need to explain anyone’s opposition to them. But in the context of upper Austria before and at the beginning of the war, after Hitler pulled his native country into the Reich, it was a different matter, one the film only fuzzily presents.

After a vigorous opening in which black-and-white newsreel footage from the time lays out the Fuehrer’s rise and march to war, the film settles down in a gorgeous precinct of northern Austria that can’t be too far from the land of The Sound of Music. And the way the area is shot by Malick and his cinematographer Jorg Widmer (a veteran Steadicam wiz who operated for Malick on the latter’s most recent feature, Song to Song ) isn’t any less rhapsodic, although now it’s accompanied by the strains of European classical masters, not Broadway luminaries.

Maintaining a large farm in a slice of Alpine paradise is Franz Jagerstatter, who, as impersonated by August Diehl, looks like a poster boy for Aryan male beauty whom Hitler himself would have approved (the real Jagerstatter was a far cry from this standard). He and his handsome, sturdy wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner) have a brood of young daughters and some fellow farmers who help maintain a high-altitude farm, plus an abode that comes dangerously close to looking like something out of the Sundance catalog.

Right here you want to call a time-out: Haven’t we seen nearly these identical images somewhere before — of gorgeous fields, scythes cutting through them, open spaces as far as the eye can see, land unspoiled but for animals scuttling about and a rustic, hand-built house anyone would love to call home? Wait, weren’t they in a film called Days of Heaven ? Was that really 41 years ago? The answer is ‘yes’ all around.

However, the local political conditions are considerably different in the new film. When Franz is first called up by the Reich for military training, in 1940, he goes along with it like everyone else, although in a letter home he does query, “What’s happened to our country?” After he’s released to return home and toil in the harvest, literal storm clouds coalesce around the mountains, as visual beauty begins to merge with simplistic metaphors and storytelling in a way that doesn’t let up.

So just when you ache for the film to begin to go deeper, it instead starts flatlining. Franz confides his misgivings to the local priest, who flatly warns him he might be shot for objecting and adds, “Your sacrifice would benefit no one.” Franz is the only refusenik around and, from this point on, the character effectively shuts up. There are increasingly long stretches in the pic during which the leading character doesn’t say a thing, even to his family, suggesting that he’s taking the maxim, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it,” a little too far.

This development presents major dramatic problems. First, it leaves Franz no way to communicate the development of his attitudes. Second, it distances him from his family.  Third, it leaves the true nature of his objections fuzzy and vague. He becomes a conscientious objector to the war and military service when he knows this is a capital offense, and yet Malick, with three hours on his hands, never gives him the opportunity to thoroughly explain his thinking.

For anyone who has even taken a cursory look at the real Jagerstatter’s behavior, one can’t help but note the ever-increasing religious component to his refusal to join Hitler’s team. But this is systematically ignored in the film, as is his inscrutable reluctance to discuss the matter with his wife and family. He becomes almost entirely uncommunicative by the third hour, scarcely what the movie needs at this point.  

If in this rendition of Jagerstatter’s life the man was not setting himself up to be a martyr, then what was he doing? Maybe the right thing, as he saw it, but he never explains it to anyone. Malick has never been averse to paring dialogue down to the bone when more gorgeous images are available, but here he willingly turns his back on exploring the inner turmoil and thought processes of his central character, leaving an empty plate where a significant moral, religious and intellectual meal was available for the taking. The pic is nearly perverse in its avoidance of dramatic meat.

As it skirts around deep or direct consideration of the nitty-gritty of its subject’s thinking, A Hidden Life begins resembling a melodramatic silent movie, and one built around a cipher. Malick’s tendency has always been to externalize, not internalize; this is a story of an intensely internal struggle, one that remains unexplored. We’re not ever really even sure if Jagerstatter’s objections are truly religious in the scriptural sense or just in a general moral way. For the audience, he’s become an empty vessel.

By 1943, the Reich has had enough of the man’s obstinance and he’s hauled off to a military prison, where the guillotine awaits. How it all ends is a foregone conclusion, but one nice touch in the climactic scene is that, on this day of multiple beheadings (Malick, fastidious as always, doesn’t actually show any), the Nazis clean the killing machine and the floor around it of the blood of the previous unfortunate. How very thoughtful.

Within moments of starting to watch the film, there can be no doubt whose signature it bears. But even with potentially deeper material, Malick is still making all the same moves, while neither varying them or amplifying what might lie beneath. His process consists of beautifying, flattening and simplifying.  

Jagerstatter, who was declared a martyr by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, had his life dramatized once before, in the 1971 Austrian television film The Refusal, directed by Axel Corti.

Production companies: Elizabeth Bay Productions, Mister Smith, Studio Babelsberg Cast: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Matthias Schoenaerts , Tobias Moretti, Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Ulrich Matthes Director-screenwriter: Terrence Malick Producers: Grant Hill, Dario Bergesio, Josh Jeter, Elizabeth Bentley Executive producers: Marcus Loges, Adam Morgan, Bill Pohlad, Charlie Woebcken, Christof Fisser, Henning Molfenter, Yi Wei Director of photography: Jorg Widmer Production designer: Sebastian Krawinkel Costume designer: Lisy Christi Editors: Rehman Nizar Ali, Joe Gleason, Sebastian Jones Music: James Newton Howard Casting: Anja Dihrberg Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)

173 minutes

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Malick's 'a hidden life' soars above the clouds.

Mark Jenkins

August Diehl stars in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life . Reiner Bajo/Fox Searchlight hide caption

August Diehl stars in Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life .

Before she made the Hitler-worshipping Triumph of the Will , Leni Riefenstahl began her career as an actress in and director of mountain films, the German genre that equated physical heights with mystical ones. Perhaps that's why Terrence Malick uses clips from Triumph of the Will to open his own mountain film, A Hidden Life . Both filmmakers exalt their subjects, even if Malick's real-life hero gives his life in opposition to Riefenstahl's.

"We lived above the clouds," announces Fani Jagerstatter (Valerie Pachner) of the alpine idyll she shares with husband Franz (August Diehl) and their three young daughters, as well as Fani's sister and Franz's mother. They work hard on their picturesque Austrian farm, yet are disconnected from the travails of lowlanders and — because this is a Malick movie — from much else as well.

Fani makes her comment in voiceover, which bobs and weaves with spoken dialogue as it always does in Malick-land. This time, the writer-director elects to present incidental conversation in unsubtitled German (and occasionally Italian), the better to distinguish everyday chatter from the words of the Jagerstatters. The family will stand alone when Hitler's curse descends on the village.

Summoned for military training in 1940, Franz reluctantly complies. But when he's conscripted for actual warfare in 1943, he declines. Along the way, the Catholic farmer discusses his concerns with a couple of priests, a bishop, and a judge. (The last two are played by Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz, each in the last screen appearance of his life.)

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Repeatedly, Franz is told that his defiance will mean nothing, change nothing, and ruin his beloved family. "How do you know what is good or bad?" asks a prison interrogator. But the conscientious objector feels he has no choice, even if his chosen path leads only to the guillotine.

That's about all that happens in A Hidden Life , which spends much of its three hours musing, or simply being beautiful. Unlike Malick's last several movies, though, his new one doesn't feel longer than it actually is. The film moves woozily yet briskly, propelled by the filmmaker's most straightforward script since 1998's The Thin Red Line (another World War II parable). As usual, Malick's style of storytelling is roundabout and allusive, but this time it seldom stalls.

The intentionally disjointed editing and reliance on voiceover aren't the only distancing devices. Cinematographer Joerg Widmer shoots with anamorphic lenses that distort everything but the center of the image, which is seldom where the action is. The jagged effect echoes the upward-thrusting landscape, and also forces the viewer to be conscious of the very process of looking. The film's gorgeous light is natural, but the viewpoint is pointedly contrived.

Just as Franz never explicitly makes the case for his martyrdom (officially declared by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007), Malick doesn't offer a tidy moral. In one scene, the small-town mayor denounces immigrants and foreigners, which suggests that the film is partly a comment on contemporary American politics. Malick may or may not be a believer — he doesn't do interviews — but his attraction to Christian mysticism is evident from even the shallowest of his recent films.

"Better to suffer injustice than to do it," counsels one character in a movie where a beating is shot from the viewpoint of the man who's being pummeled. But is A Hidden Life a tale of political righteousness or religious rapture? The pretty pictures — and a soundtrack woven with strands of Bach, Beethoven, Gorecki, and Part — suggest it's the latter.

Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is not a typical World War II drama

The latest from the director of The Tree of Life deconstructs religion and nationalism by looking at someone who refused to fight.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Everyone wants to imagine themselves the hero in a movie about heroes. Not everyone wants to consider what it would take to do what’s right when nobody may ever know — when their actions will be hidden.

A Hidden Life is not a hero’s story.

Instead of battlefield valor or underground daring, the latest film from Terrence Malick ( The Tree of Life, Badlands, Days of Heaven ) is a tale of something much more difficult to emulate: goodness and courage, without recognition. It’s about doing what’s right, even if it seems the results hurt more than they bring good to the world.

It’s set during World War II, but our Austrian protagonist Franz Jägerstätter, based on a real-life conscientious objector, does not save Jews from Nazis or give rousing speeches. In the end, what he’s done counts for what seems like very little.

A Hidden Life is Malick’s most overtly political film and one of his most religious, urgent and sometimes even uncomfortable because of what it says — to everyone, but specifically to Christians in places where they’re the majority — about the warp and weft of courage. It’s a film that seems particularly designed to lodge barbs in a comfortable audience during an era of rising white nationalism. Jägerstätter could have lived a peaceful life if he’d simply ignored what was happening in his homeland and been willing to bow the knee to the fatherland and its fascist leader, whose aim is to establish the supremacy of Franz’s own people.

But though it will bring hardship to his family and the harshest of punishments to himself, he simply cannot join the cause. The question A Hidden Life then forces us to contemplate is an uncomfortable one: Does his life, and his death, even matter?

A Hidden Life tells a story that might never have mattered

If you haven’t heard of Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl), well, that’s sort of the point. He was not, by most measures, a remarkable man. An Austrian farmer in a small village, with a beloved wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner), several small, towheaded children, and aspirations for a quiet life, Franz wrote no books, made no films, led no movements. He was, in a word, ordinary.

Jägerstätter did eventually become better recognized for his part in the war. In 1964, the American sociologist Gordon Zahn wrote his biography, titled In Solitary Witness. Thomas Merton included a chapter about him in his 1968 book Faith and Violence. An Austrian TV series told his story in 1971, and in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI declared him a martyr. He was beatified on October 26 of that year.

But he is no household name for most people, and his life was profoundly unspectacular, save for the way he swam against the current. His pastoral life at home is interrupted by the rise of the Third Reich. Franz does his military service at a base, away from the war, without seeing combat, and soon is sent home to his happy family. But Hitler adulation is rising, and it creeps into their small village. Soon, people are greeting one another with “Heil Hitler.”

Franz has heard what is happening in war — the exterminations, the persecution and slaughter of innocents — and he becomes certain that his faith will not permit him to participate if called to active military service again.

His conscience might have permitted him to serve in a hospital, but for one thing: All Austrian soldiers are required to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. And he refuses.

It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral. The home that the Jägerstätters share is in a place that looks, quite literally, like paradise, all green and gray and sunshine. Even their hard labor on the farm takes on significance: This is good land, and what it produces is good, too. The life they live has importance, as part of the larger creation.

When Franz realizes he cannot yield, though, he and his family become pariahs, spat upon and shunned by most of their neighbors. Love of their country means love of Hitler, and everyone around them, even Franz’s mother, is willing to accept this. Hitler, they say, only wants to help his country and his people, who were in degenerate shambles before he came to restore order. “He did what he had to do,” an old man from the village proclaims in the town square. “He was not content to watch his nation in a state of collapse,” he says, deriding the “foreigners” who turned their homeland into “Babylon.” How could anyone object to that who truly loved his home?

Much of the film’s nearly three-hour runtime is devoted to the couple’s wrestling with Franz’s conviction. You can see why. From the distance of history, it’s easy to imagine that we all would do what he did, that we would see evil for what it is and resist it. At the time, though, people accuse him of being conceited, of sticking to principle because he feels he’s above everyone else, of harming his family and his village needlessly. “Don’t you think you ought to consider the consequence of your actions for them?” someone asks him. Even the ministers agree. Yet Jägerstätter stands firm.

A Hidden Life is designed to discomfit the audience

A Hidden Life is not, primarily, a valorization of the life of Franz Jägerstätter, who lived in private and died in obscurity when the Reich executed him in 1943. It is, instead, a surprisingly pointed indictment of the audience by Malick, who has no punches to pull.

I happen to know this film has been in the works for many years. I had conversations about the project five or six years ago, when I worked at Christianity Today; that’s only worth saying because A Hidden Life feels as if it could have been written last year, a movie created in direct critique of our age, in which radical right-wing nationalist sentiment and white supremacy too often cloaks itself in the disguise of Christianity.

In this film, swearing allegiance to Hitler — and, more importantly, to his nationalist ideals — is frequently compared to bending the knee to the Antichrist. That’s not a small matter, but Malick (not normally known for his left hook) seems to have come out swinging. Franz’s faith is not showy, but he is horrified when he consults his village priest and he stops short of condemning the Third Reich. The bishop, too, glosses over the issue when Franz comes seeking counsel. “The priests call them heroes, even saints,” Franz says of the way the clergy speak of those who engage in the Third Reich’s military atrocities.

There’s no way this is an accident. A Hidden Life may have been in the works for years, and it tells a story from nearly eight decades ago, but it is the work of an American filmmaker who is watching the state of the world. When Franz resists his neighbors’ pleas to make nice with the government, there’s a purpose. When he says Christ’s example will not let him swear fealty with his mouth and believe something else in his mind and heart, he is doing something that would seem daring today in the churches of America or Europe, in those places where to be Christian is construed to mean supporting a xenophobia Christ never would have stood for.

As a longtime observer of Malick’s work (though I’ve found his post- Tree of Life films lacking), I was startled to see just how biting A Hidden Life is , particularly toward any Christians, or others, who might prefer their entertainment to be sentimental and comfortable. In one scene I can’t get out of my mind, an artist painting images in the nearby church tells Franz, “I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo on his head … Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.”

The implication is painfully clear — that religious art prefers a Jesus who doesn’t accost one’s sensibilities, the figures who make us feel good about ourselves. We want, as the painter puts it, to look up at the pictures on the church’s ceiling and “imagine that if they lived in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did” — in other words, if we had been around when Jesus was, we’d have known better than to execute him.

When, of course, most of us most likely would have just gone along with the crowd.

A Hidden Life revisits some of Malick’s most deeply seated themes

It’s an especially interesting story for Malick to tell. The filmmaker is strongly influenced by his Christianity, but also by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In 1969, Malick published the authoritative translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons , just as he was abandoning a doctorate at Harvard on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. His films often hew closely to and examine — in both narrative and form — ideas about the essence of humanity and phenomenology advanced by Heidegger. (You can detect as much Heidegger as the Bible in The Tree of Life .)

But Heidegger, whose philosophy often feels unusually gentle and empathetic to the human condition, also famously joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, shortly after being elected rector of the University of Freiburg (and about a decade before Jägerstätter’s execution), and he remained part of the party until the end of the war.

For most people of goodwill who find Heidegger’s work valuable (and I include myself here), his apparently willing association with the Nazi Party is confounding and infuriating. How could a man who wrote those ideas apparently ignore what was happening around him? Or, worse, condone it?

There are few answers, though people have been wrestling with them for decades. It is at least one lens through which to read Malick’s imagined scene between Jägerstätter and a Nazi Party official, in which Franz tells the official that he does not condemn anyone, assuming that some swore their allegiance to Hitler and find themselves in a position from which they cannot back away. It’s a troubling scene, one that indicates Malick’s main interest is in Jägerstätter and not in parsing out the ethics of everyone in the entire Nazi apparatus — but it does read as the filmmaker’s own wrestling with the thinker’s legacy.

Which is why Jägerstätter strikes me as in some ways a necessary corrective to our valorization, and particularly American Christians’ valorization, of figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom. Both of them are rightly admired, praised, and lauded for their attempts to take down Hitler (in Bonhoeffer’s case) and save Jews from being sent to concentration camps (in ten Boom’s). Bonhoeffer died for his efforts; ten Boom lost her sister Betsy in a concentration camp and narrowly escaped death herself.

But it is in our human nature to love the story of a person who did great things: saved lives, wrote books, stood against the dictator who wiped out millions of lives. It is less common for us to celebrate a man who threw away a comfortable life and simply refused to do what he knew he could not, and paid with his life.

Instead, A Hidden Life dares us to imagine that the latter is at least as important as the former — and maybe more so.

A Hidden Life is everything Malick’s devotees could want from a movie: beautiful, poetic, hewing closely (particularly at the end) to films like Days of Heaven and Tree of Life . His camera observes his characters from all angles, sometimes straight on, sometimes from below, sometimes distorted in a wide-angle lens shot close to the face, creating the intimate feeling that we’re experiencing their interior lives rather than just watching passively.

Its end, in which Franziska anticipates meeting Franz again — in narration that closely recalls the end of Tree of Life in particular — is a note of hope. Malick concludes, by way of a thesis, with lines from George Eliot’s Middlemarch :

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Jägerstätter’s refusal to bow the knee looked pointless in his time, but in its own way, it was a kind of heroic act, though not the kind that ordinarily merits the Hollywood treatment. The things that are not so ill with us are because people we’ll never hear about did what they had to do for people they’d never know, and who’d never know them. A hidden life is worth living, and giving up, so that others may live.

A Hidden Life premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and is awaiting a release date.

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A hidden life.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 7 Reviews
• Kids Say 0 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Depressing but poetic story of conscientious WWII objector.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that A Hidden Life is a Terrence Malick-directed WWII drama based on the true story of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who was called up to fight but refused to take a loyalty oath to Adolf Hitler and was arrested. The movie is beautifully poetic but very long (nearly three hours) and…

Why Age 13+?

Disturbing Nazi footage. Soldiers practice with guns and bayonets. Guard vicious

Married couple kisses.

Drinking beer in pub. Minor character drunk. Background character smokes.

Any Positive Content?

Raises compelling questions about heroism (was Franz Jägerstätter a hero for sta

Franz is something of a role model, given that standing up for what he believes

Violence & Scariness

Disturbing Nazi footage. Soldiers practice with guns and bayonets. Guard viciously beats up prisoner. Threatening farmers. Shoving, fighting, wrestling. Yelling/shouting. Pushing, slapping. Man arrested, put in handcuffs. Spitting, throwing things. General anger. Character sentenced to death.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Raises compelling questions about heroism (was Franz Jägerstätter a hero for standing up for what he believed in at great cost to himself and his family?) and the nature of hatred (why did the neighbors react the way they did to Franziska if Franz was trying to do the right thing?).

Positive Role Models

Franz is something of a role model, given that standing up for what he believes in takes tremendous courage, and he risks everything. But at the same time, very little change/result comes of it.

Parents need to know that A Hidden Life is a Terrence Malick -directed WWII drama based on the true story of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who was called up to fight but refused to take a loyalty oath to Adolf Hitler and was arrested. The movie is beautifully poetic but very long (nearly three hours) and quite relentlessly downbeat. It includes some disturbing Nazi footage and scenes of brutal beatings in prison. Characters sometimes threaten, fight, shove, wrestle, slap, spit, throw things, and shout at one another. A character is arrested, put in handcuffs, and later sentenced to death. A married couple kisses, and characters are seen drinking socially and smoking in the background. One secondary character appears drunk in one scene. Language isn't an issue. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (7)

Based on 7 parent reviews

A Hidden Life – Doesn’t hide its Indulgences

An adult movie appropriate for kids who find it interesting, what's the story.

In A HIDDEN LIFE, it's 1939 in Austria, and farmer Franz ( August Diehl ) lives peacefully with his wife, Franziska ( Valerie Pachner ), in a small village near the mountains. War breaks out, and Franz is sent to basic training, but when France surrenders, he's sent back home. Hoping the worst is over, the couple continues their life, working the farm and raising three girls. Unfortunately, Franz is called back to the war, where he's required to take an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Franz refuses, knowing the consequences. Franziska supports him, despite the fact that all their neighbors have begun to treat her as an outcast. Franz is arrested and awaits the trial that will decide his fate.

Is It Any Good?

No one quite captures nature's beauty and slowness as well as Terrence Malick does, but his mastery only barely saves this three-hour-long story that's full of misery, despair, and hopelessness. Based on a true story, A Hidden Life certainly tackles important subjects, not only honoring the life and sacrifice of the real Franz Jägerstätter, but also examining mob mentality and the way that neighbor can turn on neighbor over a belief, no matter how wrong-headed that belief may be.

But Malick's drifting, exploratory filmmaking methods are a better fit for poetic impressions than for concrete stories and themes. He shows he doesn't quite have the temperament for smoothing out this story, making it flow, and providing some ups to counterbalance the downs. And the running time becomes oppressive. But there's no denying that A Hidden Life captures some truly striking small moments, such as the family playing in the grass beneath the mountains, the women harvesting crops, or men drifting around a prison yard, forbidden to speak. The late actor Bruno Ganz also makes a touching appearance as the judge who hears Franz's case.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about A Hidden Life 's violence . How did it affect you? Does the fact that the movie is based on real events make it seem more or less powerful?

What do you think made Franz continue to refuse to take the oath to Hitler when he could have saved his own life and gone back to his family?

Why did the farmers' neighbors treat them so hatefully after Franz made his decision? Have you ever felt that way toward someone for thinking differently?

Why are depressing stories told? Why is it important to learn about horrible things that happened in the past?

What's the appeal of movies based on true stories?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 13, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : March 17, 2020
• Cast : August Diehl , Valerie Pachner , Bruno Ganz
• Director : Terrence Malick
• Studio : Fox Searchlight Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 174 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic material including violent images
• Last updated : March 31, 2022

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A Hidden Life Review

A Hidden Life

There is a film buff theory that Terrence Malick makes his best work set in the past. From Badlands (set in 1959) and Days Of Heaven (1916) to The Thin Red Line (1942-’43), The New World (1607) and The Tree Of Life (’50s via the prehistoric era), there is something about Malick’s lyrical style and ambition to grapple with Big Themes that thrives in timeless period pieces. After mixed responses to his contemporary set-works ( To The Wonder , Knight Of Cups , Song To Song ), Malick is back on his historical bent telling the true story of a religious Austrian conscientious objector who chose prison over fighting for the Nazis. The result is the most engaged and urgent he has been for ages.

Set between 1939 and 1943, A Hidden Life centres on Franz Jägerstätter (Diehl), a farmer happily married to Fani (Valerie Pachner), picking wildflowers and playing games with his three daughters on a bucolic, very Malick-y Austrian hillside. Yet when Franz is forced to enlist in the German Army (he finds the military drills amusing), he refuses to swear his allegiance to Hitler, making him an outcast in his small community (kids pelt his daughters with mud) and putting him in prison facing potential execution. Malick’s screenplay uses Franz’s predicament to explore the dynamic between religion and faith, highlighting the failure of the institution who consistently tell him to give in. This is in contrast to the unwavering support of Fani (an excellent Pachner) whatever the consequences.

When Malick leans into the Christ parallels in the story, Diehl always keeps Franz human and grounded.

Where there has been an airy-fairyness to his recent work, here it is rooted in a real world of moral turpitude. Much of this is down to Diehl’s performance as a man defined as much by what he doesn’t do as what he does. Without resorting to dialogue, Diehl conveys untapped reservoirs of doubt and torment over what his principles mean for his family. When, in the second half, Malick leans into the Christ parallels in the story, Diehl always keeps Franz human and grounded.

Employing a new cinematographer, Jörg Widmer, who had previously worked with Malick as a camera operator, the film’s striking rustic look is defined by a use of natural light, the imagery flitting between the float-y giddy quality of The Tree Of Life and static misty vistas of the Austrian hillsides that remain impervious to the machinations of humans. All of Malick’s divisive filmmaking tics — multiple voiceovers (taken from Franz and Fani’s letters), an obsession with nature, a spiritually severe tone, a hefty running time that is Malick’s longest to date — are all present and correct, but here they are allied to a more surefooted sense of narrative and purpose. If Malick’s contemporary-set films felt like they took place in a high-minded bubble, here he uses history lessons to shine a light on today. “If our leaders are evil,” asks Franz, “what are we to do?” It’s a good question, and perhaps in 2020 the only question.

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Movies | 13 08 2019

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Movie Review: A Hidden Life (2019)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> January 3, 2020

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today” — Ernest Hemingway

In its depiction of the life of an Austrian farmer who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Hitler or to fight in an unjust war, Terrence Malick’s (“ Song to Song ”) nearly three-hour film, A Hidden Life , reminds us of the power of moral and spiritual commitment. Based on the exchange of letters between Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl, “ The Young Karl Marx ”), and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner, “The Ground Beneath My Feet”), it is a sublime portrait of a man compelled to call upon his last reservoir of strength to maintain his commitment, knowing that his act of conscience will do nothing to stop the war and will put his family and his own life at risk.

The film opens in 1939 in the village of St. Radegund in Austria where Franz lives a simple life with his wife and their three daughters. Devout Catholics, they live in a close-knit community, gathering in the local pub on Saturday nights and in church on Sunday mornings. In the rich poetic style Malick is known for, we see fields of grain, pristine flowing streams, awe-inspiring mountain vistas, and children running and playing, as gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Jörg Widmer (“The Invisibles”) and enhanced by the music of James Newton Howard (“ Red Sparrow ”). To remind us of the context, we view grainy newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, an event that foreshadowed the start of World War II less than two years later.

It is clear to Jägerstätter that every able-bodied Austrian man will be forced to sign an oath pledging their allegiance to the Führer but Franz, whose father fought and died in World War I, asks Fani, “Oh my wife, what has become of our country?” In 1940, Jägerstätter is conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but is twice sent home on the grounds of his “reserved civilian occupation” as a farmer. He refuses to obey a third order, however, recalling a dream in which he saw a train carrying hundreds of Hitler Youth to their death as a warning of the evil of Nazism. In his writing Jägerstätter says that, for him, “to fight and kill people so that the godless Nazi regime could conquer and enslave ever more of the world’s peoples would mean becoming personally guilty.”

Since a referendum was held on April 10, 1938 in which an astonishing 99.73 percent of Austrians voted in favor of joining the Third Reich, it is not surprising that Franz receives little support from his neighbors or from the local priest (Tobias Moretti, “Cold Hell”). A religious man, Franz turns to the Diocesan Bishop of Linz, Joseph Calasanz Fliesser (Michael Nyqvist, “ Frank & Lola ”) for support but is told by the Bishop that it is not his task to decide whether the war was righteous or unrighteous. In a powerful scene, a man (Johan Leysen, “Claire Darling”) who paints murals of a happy Christ on a church ceiling laments the fear that has kept him from painting Jesus’ suffering on the cross.

In prison, Malick captures Jägerstätter’s humanity when he helps a prisoner get up from the ground after a beating and when he sneaks an extra slice of bread to a hungry prisoner. When one of Franz’ final judges played by the late Bruno Ganz (“ Amnesia ”) suggests that the prisoner’s principles will change nothing and that if he signs the oath he will go free, Franz smiles and says that he is already free. Though his mother, friends, and relatives try to change his mind, only Fani stands by him saying, “If I hadn’t stood by him, he wouldn’t have had anyone at all.” It is only later when he is in a Berlin prison, condemned to die as a traitor, that she begs him to sign a loyalty oath.

Malick’s point of view, however, is clear and unmistakable as stated in the quote from author George Eliot shown in the film:

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

54 years later, on May 7, 1997, Jägerstätter verdict was annulled by the District Court of Berlin and his martyrdom was officially confirmed by the Vatican ten years later. His beatification took place in St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz in October, 2007 and he is now referred to as Blessed Franz Jägerstätter. How many people in power today who face the same accounting will be remembered for their acts of conscience?

Tagged: courage , religion , true story , war , WWII

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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• DVD & Streaming

A Hidden Life

• Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 13, 2019
• August Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter; Valerie Pachner as Franziska Jägerstätter; Maria Simon as Resie; Tobias Moretti as Priest Ferdinand Fürthauer; Alexander Fehling as Fredrich Feldmann; Franz Rogowski as Waldlan; Karin Neuhäuser as Rosalia

Home Release Date

• March 17, 2020
• Terrence Malick

Distributor

• Fox Searchlight

Movie Review

We make our choices. And our choices make us.

Sure, biology, heredity and environment all play their part. But ultimately, we choose who we are. The decisions we make declare and reinforce our desires, ambitions and values. We may say, Family is the most important thing in my life, but do our lives reflect that? We may declare, I love God above all else, but do we mean it? Regardless of what we say, what we do speaks louder. Our choices tell the tale.

And sometimes those choices—even the right choices—exact a staggering cost.

Franz Jägerstätter did not choose to be born in Austria (then Austria-Hungary) in 1907. He certainly would never have chosen Austria’s fate in the 1930s: to be tied at the ankle to Adolph Hitler and pulled into his vision of a united Nazi Europe.

Indeed, many would say Franz had little choice at all. His tiny village of St. Radegund had largely embraced Hitler’s vision; and even if it hadn’t, it didn’t matter. Every able-bodied man was expected to serve in the military and swear personal allegiance to Hitler. Certainly, not everyone in the Nazi army was a zealot for the Führer. But they took the pledge all the same: They had wages to earn, families to feed and duties to honor—if not to the Third Reich, then at least to their homeland.

And, after all, the pledge was just a bunch of words, right?

For Franz, it’s not so simple. A fervent Catholic, he’s troubled by Hitler’s regime—his discriminatory policies; his pugilistic drive; his insistence upon absolute, undying loyalty. But Franz sees the man not as some sort of Teutonic savior, but as a demagogue who’s dangerous and perhaps evil. Franz watches as Hitler’s hateful rhetoric twists his village into something unfamiliar: a place of anger and intolerance. Even before the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, it was clear—at least to Franz—that Hitler was dangerous. Perhaps evil. To pledge personal allegiance to this man feels wrong.

“If God gives us free will, we’re responsible for what we do, what we fail to do, aren’t we?” a troubled Franz asks the presiding bishop. “I want to save my life, but not through lies.”

The bishop—fearful, perhaps—disagrees. “You have a duty to the Fatherland,” he tells Franz. “The Church tells you so.” He quotes Paul, and how important it is to submit to the powers placed in authority. And he adds (stifling what might be a sob) that the cathedral’s own bells are slated to be melted into bullets.

But the bishop’s logic doesn’t convince Franz. His mother’s disapproval and grief don’t sway him. The village’s leaders plead with him, then curse him. And though a farmer’s exemption protected Franz in the early part of the war, he knows he could be called up any day.

That day comes in February of 1943. He reports for duty, as required. He lines up with the rest of Hitler’s future soldiers. But when the time comes to raise his hand and pledge his fidelity, Franz doesn’t move.

He’s made his choice.

All that’s left is for him—and for his family—is to pay the price.

Positive Elements

I think most of us would like to think we’d take the same principled stance if we stepped into Franz’s shoes, especially with the benefit of historical hindsight. I’m not so sure how many of us would actually do so, however. And, of course, we must remember that Franz wasn’t just risking his own well-being by standing against an immoral regime: He was risking his family’s, too.

As such, Franz’s wife, Franziska, shows just as much courage in her own way. When Franz refuses to bend the knee to Hitler, Franziska—whom Franz just calls Fanny—suffers. No one outside her family will help her with the farm—a difficult job made more so by Franz’s absence. Neighbors and former friends ignore and openly berate her. People throw things or spit, and the family’s three little girls are treated with just as much scorn. Many tell her that she must get Franz to change his mind. Some (including Franz’s own mother) blame Fanny for her husband’s unyielding anti-Hitler stance in the first place.

But Fanny’s response is, dare I say, downright biblical . The movie doesn’t give us a ton of insight as to what she would do in Franz’s place, but she’s quite clear about her own choice: She will support her husband in whatever he chooses. If he holds true to his commitment and refuses to swear allegiance to Hitler, she’ll love him through all the turbulence and tragedy that decision might bring. If he recants and salutes, she’ll still love him. Throughout it all, their love for each other is powerful and tangible.

Occasionally we also see moments of quiet kindness and charity outside the story’s central couple. A miller gives Fanny more grain than is warranted. When Fanny’s cart breaks down in the middle of town, an older woman helps her pick up her scattered produce and helps her fix the cart as well. And Fanny, too, gives when she can. When a hungry woman comes by her farm, Fanny gives the obviously grateful woman a few vegetables.

Spiritual Elements

What does it mean to follow God? And what will it cost? These questions sit at the very heart of A Hidden Life , and I could spend thousands of words unpacking the film’s thoughts. But for now, I’ll try to keep this (relatively) brief.

Early on, Franz listens to an artist who paints religious figures on the inside of the local church. The artist mulls the disconnect between his work and his life: “I paint all this suffering, but I don’t suffer myself,” he says. He says, too, that while his paintings serve a purpose, they don’t show the reality of faith. Indeed, he doesn’t have the courage to paint Christ as He truly is, the artist admits. If he (the artist) painted truth, the parishioners would “just ignore it.”

That conversation lays the groundwork for the difficult days that follow for Franz and his Fanny. While the artist says that his work helps people “look up from those pews and dream,” the real work of following Christ can be difficult, dangerous and dispiriting in hard moments.

Still, Franz and Fanny are people of deep faith. Franz sweeps the local church and rings the church bell. The letters he exchanges with his wife are filled with Scripture and spiritual references. Their belief in God powers them—and sometimes leaves them with perplexing questions.

“Why have our prayers not been answered?” Fanny writes. “If we’re faithful to Him, He’ll be faithful to us?” In another letter, she expresses hope that the Almighty will deliver them from this ever-present evil. “Greetings in God, who will make everything right again,” she says. And again, she expresses what increasingly feels like a naïve belief that “no evil can happen to a good man.” She pours out her faith, both on paper to her husband and in prayer to God (and the moviegoer), expressing hope and conviction that God will fix things.

But the burden she bears grows heavier, and Franz’s chances of salvation grow dimmer. “Lord, you do nothing,” we hear Fanny say. But eventually, Fanny accepts things she can’t understand. Someday, she says, “We will know what all this is for. No mysteries. We will know why we live.”

Meanwhile, Franz’s tribulations feel like an echo of Christ’s own, in a way. He’s shuttled between prison cells and courts, as some around him try to “save” him from himself. A military judge, who holds Franz’s life in his hands, meets with Franz privately: You get the sense that he, like Pilate with Jesus, knows that Franz is “innocent.” And the judge doesn’t understand why Franz doesn’t just recant.

Both Franz and Fanny are explicitly tempted to abandon both the cause and the underlying faith they have, and Director Terrence Malick seems to stick Mephistophelian characters in where he can. One of the most powerful of those is a fellow prisoner, who whispers to Franz in a jail yard. “He who created the world, He created evil,” the man hisses. “We all have blood on our hands. No one is innocent.”

And the Catholic Church—which Malick paints as well-meaning but, in this instance, weak—encourages Franz to recant, too. “God doesn’t care what you say!” a priest tells him, trying to save his life. “Only what’s in your heart!”

[ Spoiler Warning ] Franz successfully navigates these many temptations, in the movie’s estimation. He does not waver. In his last letter home, Franz writes to his children, “My dear ones, don’t forget me in your prayers. I pray for you on the other side.”

Sexual Content

We see Franz and Fanny in happier times. They’re deeply in love, and their every action together seems to express it. They dance passionately in the local gathering hall, kiss passionately when they’re reunited after an absence and, let’s be frank, have a hard time keeping their hands off one another. But while their marriage produced three children, we never see anything approaching sex or lovemaking here, and everyone’s clothes stay prudently on.

We hear that Resie, Fanny’s sister who’s come to live with she and Franz, was deserted by her own “man.”

Violent Content

We see some pretty graphic black-and-white war footage depicting human corpses and the bloated remains of animals.

Anger sometimes spills into scuffles and fights, where the participants have to be pulled off one another. In prison, Franz is beaten badly (though because we see the attack through Franz’s own eyes, we don’t see the blow or resulting bruises). Nazi guards beat other prisoners for small or even pretended offenses, and off camera we hear a gunshot. A guard pulls Franz off a chair he was standing on, then repeatedly pulls that same chair away when he makes Franz try to sit on it. Another guard smashes Franz’s sink.

We see a Nazi guillotine behind a black curtain: A small, lidded bucket is lifted, suggesting that the head of the guillotine’s last victim is rattling around in there. A man discusses the skill of the Nazi executioner—how he makes his cut before the victim even knows what’s happening.

Crude or Profane Language

None—at least none in English. The dialogue occasionally slips into German and Austrian without the benefit of subtitles.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The Mayor champions the Nazi cause during an outdoor gathering where the beer is flowing—and the guy may be a bit tipsy himself. He toasts Hitler, knocking his mug of beer against Franz’s, which remains unheld on the table. The toast knocks the glass over and spills Franz’s beer. Other villagers drink elsewhere, often in the background of celebrations. One or two folks smoke cigarettes.

Other Negative Elements

The movie drives home the painful cost exacted by Franz’s and Fanny’s principled stand. As we’ve mentioned, many of their neighbors and, presumably, former friends, turn their backs on them.

It’s hard to do the right thing. It’s even harder when it seems as though there’s no possible benefit for doing it. And even though many of Christians would reject prosperity-gospel theology, we might still subconsciously believe in it. We believe that when we do the right thing and follow God, we should be rewarded. Blessed.

Franz had little hope of reward, little illusion that his family would be blessed. Those around Franz warned him of this outcome, then cursed him. His accusers implored Franz to stop his foolish protest—to just say the words and be done with it. You will go free , they tell him. His stance is not good for anyone, least of all Franz and his family. It’s not just hopeless: It’s utterly meaningless.

“No one will be changed,” a Nazi judge tells him, not without sympathy. “The world will go on as before.” Indeed, no one will even know what Franz is doing, or why. He’s told that his stand—righteous or not—will never be known outside the prison’s walls. He and his principles will vanish from history.

But no act of faith is wasted in God’s creative calculus. And sometimes, even hidden lives, hidden sacrifices, are eventually revealed.

Franz Jägerstätter was a real conscientious objector to Hitler’s Third Reich, and he suffered because he believed that faith called him to resist a wicked ruler. And while the Catholic Church of his time begged him to recant, the Catholic Church of ours beatified him. Pope Benedict XVI declared him a martyr in 2007.

Franz’s letters home, and Fanny’s letters to him, preserved his life story and the lessons we can learn from it. And Terrence Malick’s beautiful film will help communicate his remarkable faith, integrity and bravery to a new audience.

Malick’s movies aren’t as accessible as, say, your typical romcom or Marvel superhero flick. He leans on breathtaking scenery and almost stream-of-consciousness plotting, giving his movies a hazy, dreamlike quality. He might wait for hours for just the right light to strike a scene, and he’s been known to toss out the script entirely, relying instead on his and his actors’ instincts—how they might respond in the moment. He also pushes heavily into spirituality, embracing a strong sense of the transcendent (even though that doesn’t always point explicitly a Christian understanding of God).

But A Hidden Life features Malick as tightly structured as he’s been in years. And that makes this movie, in spite of its more than three-hour run time, a Malick flick for the rest of us.

Despite its difficult subject, Malick’s movie avoids crass content, so much so that even the PG-13 rating might—if you tabulate the sex and violence we actually see here—seem rather churlish.

But we don’t watch movies to avoid problematic content. We watch them to be moved . And this movie moves powerfully, sweeping through the jagged green Austrian mountains to the gray walls of Nazi prisons. If the dialogue is sparse, our players speak volumes through their eyes: the joyful, dancing eyes of fond embraces; the terrified eyes shifting and darting; the haunted, tortured eyes of those condemned.

A Hidden Life is a beautiful, memorable mixture of art and faith. And for Christians in our own time wrestling with the same sorts of questions of doing what’s right regardless of cost, it’s a powerful reminder that what we do—what we stand for—matters.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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A Hidden Life Reviews

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A Hidden Life is the first good movie that I ever disliked merely because of the cinematography

I will never underestimate or undervalue the importance of cinematography again. A Hidden Life is a great story with decent acting and an above average script.

By all metrics, I should love this movie. However, the cinematography alone made it feel like a plodding chore to watch the entire thing. This felt like an art student's overly ambitious editing effort than an accomplished director's polished product.

Every dialogue was treated the exact same way-regardless of length (and I hated it!). As every conversation proceeded, there were transitions to different angles, splices of nature scenes, zooming in and angled rotations of camera. It's not an action scene for crying out loud! If every emotional exchange has more jump cuts than a Steven Seagull fight scene, you're doing it wrong!

It was so jarring in the beginning that I thought it was a time lapse (as in the guy returned and continued the conversation from a few days previously).

If I was an actor putting my all into an emotional scene, I'd be pretty disappointed (if not angry) that it was edited with jump shots from different camera angles, here are some clouds, here comes a zoom in, look a babbling brook, let's snip some portions so the actor moves like a claymation figure, and so on.

I'm probably entirely alone considering the movie is highly rated, but I feel it's a wonderful stew that received a huge turd plopped into it thereby ruining the entire experience. In numerous decades of (what I guess to be good) cinematography, I've never realized its importance.

Did anyone else find the editing off-putting enough to ruin the experience?

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A Hidden Life

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A Hidden Life Review

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Book Review: ‘Secret Life of the Universe’ is a primer on search for life beyond Earth

This cover image released by Scribner shows “The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life” by Nathalie A. Cabrol. (Scribner via AP)

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As director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, astrobiologist Nathalie A. Cabrol’s work is focused on answering the question of whether we’re alone in the universe.

In “The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life,” readers won’t walk away with a clear-cut answer to that question. But they’ll have a newfound appreciation for the massive scientific undertaking that is moving closer toward finding one.

Cabrol writes that we’re in the midst of a “golden age of astrobiology,” and her book is an awe-inspiring and lucid primer for the general public on her field. That golden age is highlighted by images captured by the Webb Space Telescope that have transformed the public’s understanding of the universe.

From the moon to planets that mirror settings from “Star Wars,” Cabrol takes readers on a descriptive tour of the universe and the building blocks of life that scientists continue to chase.

Her writing and effort to broaden the public’s appreciation of the universe’s jaw-dropping vastness is unsurprisingly reminiscent of Sagan, the popular astronomer and namesake of the center she leads. And, like Sagan, she makes a compelling case for why we may not be alone in the universe.

She also offers a fascinating preview of future space missions that may help answer that question even further.

But, most importantly, she illustrates how understanding the nature of life in the universe may help underscore the need to address the challenges facing what for now remains a lonely pale blue dot.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Alien: Romulus viewers ‘disgusted’ as dead film star is brought back to life through AI

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Ian Holm’s character Ash was brought back to life using AI in the new film Alien: Romulus and fans are horrified by the dead actor’s inclusion.

Alien: Romulus, the scary reboot of the classic body horror franchise landed in cinemas on August 16.

While fans have loved this new instalment, they have been disgusted by one element of the film, the use of AI to include Holm who played Ash in the original 1979 film but died in 2020 at the age of 88.

Even before the film was released, Metro.co.uk ‘s Tori Brazier suggested that Holm’s AI incarnation would upset viewers as she branded the move ‘ethically murky.’

‘ Evil Dead  filmmaker Álvarez also pins the role of pivotal plot device on a character cameo some audience members may consider ethically murky before leaping to a grisly final act that features a major swing,’ she said in her review.

Brazier later added: ‘For some, that ethically dubious character revival will remain the scariest part of all from Alien: Romulus’ – and she was right.

Fans took to social media to express their disgust after seeing Holm’s likeness being used in the film.

‘I am of the opinion that the Alien series and Ian Holm’s memory deserve better than this,’ said HelsingBear on X.

‘In all honesty, as much as I loved and adored Romulus, I truly see no justifiable reason to bring back Ian Holm posthumously via CGI. They should’ve just kept Daniel Betts as Rook, and there would be no issue. It was the most unnecessary “cameo” of all time and just weird,’ said Within1Stem.

‘Probably late to the party on this, but the usage of Ian Holm’s image and presence in the new Alien film feels awful to me. I hate it. I hate that movies are doing this with dead actors,’ said Willow_catelyn.

Some also suggested that they didn’t enjoy the cameo because the CGI wasn’t particularly good.

‘Alien Romulus was amazing BUT every time cgi ian holm popped up i groaned. it genuinely looked so bad,’ said stabfreeman.

The director also emphasised that the film relied mostly on practical shots and avoided CGI as much as possible, raising the question of why they relied so heavily on CGI and AI for the inclusion of this character when trying to avoid this Hollywood tool.

Another fan suggested that the director should have asked Lance Henriksen to play the role instead.

‘I’m fine with Alien: Romulus, by and large, but I don’t understand why you’d use a dead Ian Holm when we have a live Lance Henriksen,’ suggested CelluloidWhisky.

Henrikson played Bishop, an android in Aliens (1986) and Bishop’s human designer Michael Weyland in Alien 3. 

Others felt the homage to Holm was a great addition to the film. ‘It was really cool seeing Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus again,’ said NosrabNeb.

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Speaking to Entertainment Weekly Álvarez said that Holm was included only after he asked permission from Holm’s widow.

‘The whole thing started with me calling the estate and talking with his widow,’ he said.

‘She felt that Ian was given the cold shoulder by Hollywood in the last years of his life, that he would’ve loved to be part of more projects after The Hobbit, but he wasn’t. So she was thrilled about the idea of having him back.’

In the original film, Holm played Ash, a robot – known as synthetics – who was a crew member but later destroyed by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). In the 2024 film, which takes place just after the events of the 1979 movie, an AI Holm plays a character named Rook who is a different physical android but shares the same consciousness as Ash.

Explaining the new character made via AI the director explained: ‘He has the likeness, but he has a different demeanour. Rook and Ash have the same knowledge because it’s all Mother (the mainframe of the ship).’

‘It’s a different android, but it’s the same consciousness of Mother that moved from one android to the other.’

Got a story?

If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us [email protected], calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.

MORE : Netflix fans obsessed with romcom that was completely panned when it was released 10 years ago

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Book Review: 'Secret Life of the Universe' is a primer on search for life beyond Earth

Astrobiologist Nathalie A

As director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, astrobiologist Nathalie A. Cabrol's work is focused on answering the question of whether we're alone in the universe.

In “The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life,” readers won't walk away with a clear-cut answer to that question. But they'll have a newfound appreciation for the massive scientific undertaking that is moving closer toward finding one.

Cabrol writes that we're in the midst of a “golden age of astrobiology,” and her book is an awe-inspiring and lucid primer for the general public on her field. That golden age is highlighted by images captured by the Webb Space Telescope that have transformed the public's understanding of the universe.

From the moon to planets that mirror settings from “Star Wars,” Cabrol takes readers on a descriptive tour of the universe and the building blocks of life that scientists continue to chase.

Her writing and effort to broaden the public's appreciation of the universe's jaw-dropping vastness is unsurprisingly reminiscent of Sagan, the popular astronomer and namesake of the center she leads. And, like Sagan, she makes a compelling case for why we may not be alone in the universe.

She also offers a fascinating preview of future space missions that may help answer that question even further.

But, most importantly, she illustrates how understanding the nature of life in the universe may help underscore the need to address the challenges facing what for now remains a lonely pale blue dot.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘One Life’ on Paramount+, In Which Anthony Hopkins Brings His A-Game to an Otherwise Ordinary Historical Drama

Where to stream:.

• Anthony Hopkins

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rebel Moon Part Two: Director’s Cut’ on Netflix, Where Zack Snyder Amplifies The Violence On His Way To The Conclusion For His Lengthy Space Epic 

Stream it or skip it: ‘rebel moon part one: director’s cut’ on netflix, zack snyder’s extra long take on his already unwieldy sci-fi epic, ‘rebel moon: director’s cut:’ more blood, more sex, and a more comprehensible plot, ‘rebel moon: director’s cut’ release date: when does ‘rebel moon: director’s cut’ come out on netflix.

One Life ( now streaming on Paramount+ ) is proof that the presence of Sir Anthony Hopkins always and without fail elevates a movie. (OK, maybe not that one Transformers movie, but at least his scenes were memorably unintentionally hilarious.) This film is more stereotypical of what we’d expect from the veteran Oscar winner, who plays the older version of real-life British gent Nicholas Winton, whose efforts to extract hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia made him an unsung hero of World War II. Johnny Flynn ( Stardust ) plays the younger version of Winton as the film jumps between the late 1930s and 1987 – but as you’d expect, Hopkins is the one who truly carries the movie.

ONE LIFE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nicholas (Hopkins) has too much stuff. Boxes and boxes of it, piled up here and there, in the den, in the garage. He’s 80-ish, and he takes it slow around their nice, spacious house, but he still drives and still dives into the pool in their lovely back garden. His wife Grete (Lena Olin) insists it’s time to get rid of some of that stuff – but they’ll find a special place for that one attache he keeps in the drawer, she promises. It’s the kind of attache that’s ripe to trigger a flashback: Young Nicholas (Flynn) visiting Prague in 1938. He visits a refugee camp where children clamor for the bit of chocolate in his pocket. A sweet girl, in spite of the harsh conditions and the dirt on her face and hands, smiles wide and shows the gap where her two front teeth are about to grow in. A 12-year-old girl looks considerably more haunted, holding a baby that isn’t her sibling or cousin but one that belongs to people who are just, well, no longer there. 

The Nazis have already pushed these people from their homes, and are on the brink of invading Prague. Something must be done about this, Nicholas insists. He can’t just return to London and resume his job as a stockbroker. He wires his boss and says he’ll be back whenever, and gets to work, recruiting humanitarians Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) to come up with a plan to extract the children to the U.K. Nicholas goes home and gets his mother (Helena Bonham Carter) to help him drum up money, visas and foster families. He pleads with British bureaucrats to be, well, less damn bureaucratic, and they put the kids’ paperwork to the top of the pile. 

Letters are written. Photos are taken. Money is raised. Promissories are penned. Typewriters go tickity-tack. Phones ring. Children say heartbreaking goodbyes to their parents as they board trains to safety. Meanwhile, in 1987, Nicholas contemplates. That is to say, he stares longingly into the distance, in between cleaning jaunts (he piles up boxes of old paperwork and burns them in the yard). He opens the attache and pulls out a scrapbook full of photos and documentation. There’s no pride or nostalgia on his face. Just – blankness? An unwillingness to open old wounds, perhaps? He takes the attache to a newspaper, and the doltish editor sends him away. This is Nicholas’ legacy. And he doesn’t know what to do with it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s some very clear parallels to Schindler’s List here.

Performance Worth Watching: Without Hopkins’ haunted nonverbal performance, One Life would be incredibly ordinary.

Memorable Dialogue: Nicholas states it plainly at the refugee camp: “I have seen this, and I cannot unsee it. And because I may be able to do something about it, I must at least try.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: One Life is a character study cloaked in the trappings of a historical drama – and thank the cinema gods it sidesteps most of the trappings of the staid biopic. The finely shot, relatively bare-bones 1930s sequences lay the groundwork for Hopkins to silently and existentially ruminate in 1987, where Nicholas very pragmatically clean-sweeps the clutter from his life and ends up finding a bit of emotional clarity in that precious briefcase. Director James Hawes shows an eye for the usual period detail, but more crucially, executes the narrative with a sense of urgency, maintaining tension as the Nazi invasion looms and using montages effectively to convey significant amounts of visual information while Lucia Zucchetti edits crisply, sharply and with clear intent. This is not at all the talky foot-dragger of a drama you may expect it to be.

Hopkins’ scenes are where the film finds its true agency, a complexity beyond the easy and simple assertions of his character’s selflessness. It’s obvious that Nicholas deserves recognition, but he may not feel quite the same. And so the actor, furrowing his brow, stirs all manner of intangibles into the screen version of Nicholas: The specter of aging, feelings of unworthiness, long-faded memories vividly returning. On top of all that, and more visibly spelled out by the screenplay, is nagging regret: Did I do enough? That notion leads to an inevitable tearjerker conclusion, one that feels less egregious after Hopkins put in all that work. This is precisely why he’s a master of the craft.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hopkins’ thoughtful artistry, coupled with Hawes’ technical proficiency, renders One Life a thoughtful and memorable drama.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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