“We watch films in the dark and quiet solitude of the theatre, but we emerge, blinking in the sunlight of the day, reconnected to the world in which we hope to dwell.”
— Martin Woessner, Cosmic Cinema: On the Philosophical Films of Terrence Malick
Since my first encounter with the films of Terrence Malick, I’ve been gripped by the veiled mystery at their core. There's much that can be said through critical study, but what holds me most is not the analysis but the immediate experience. Film, after all, is an experiential medium: it is like standing before an icon in a church, allowing it to penetrate you, transform you, and beckon you toward something ineffable and incomprehensible. An encounter with the sacred. With heaven. That, I believe, is the spirit of Malick’s work. Few films achieve this. His do.
Malick’s frames are human, intimate, and meditative—but more than that, they are contemplative and mystagogical. His use of wide-angle lenses, handheld cameras, fluid Steadicam movement, and the unpredictable unfolding of action within the frame draws us into a world of wonder, of otherness—all while being contained in the ordinary world of which they take part. One might even dare to call it mystical.
I remember my first viewing of The Tree of Life. I sat through the first thirty minutes in bewilderment. The film began amidst a grieving family in small-town Texas, then suddenly expanded to the birth of the cosmos, the origins of the earth, and the emergence of life. What began as curiosity quickly gave way to impatience and discomfort. I felt flustered, in a way I can only compare to someone unaccustomed to silence, suddenly left alone in a still room for the first time. All distractions fade. The deeper, often darker parts of ourselves rise to the surface.
I don’t mean to sound overly romantic. But if I had to choose a single word for the experience of watching a Malick film, I’d call it theophanic—an appearing of God. In this sense, his films are sacramental. I borrow here from C.S. Lewis, who in his essay Transposition describes how something visible can bear the presence of something more:
“The sunlight in a picture is not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to spoken. It is a sign, but also something more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolic but sacramental.”
Much has been written about Malick—largely from a philosophical standpoint. But this is often a philosophy detached from transcendence, and thus from sacramentality. From what I’ve gathered through studying his life over the past seven years, Malick left academic philosophy precisely because of this limitation. As Martin Woessner notes, Malick once said he felt he was “nearing the end of [his] rope as an academic.”
I don’t believe it’s possible to enter the mystery of Malick’s work apart from theology. Not the theology of dogma and denomination, necessarily, but a theology that underpins reality itself. Without this lens, his films may register as visual abstraction—sublime, but empty. And though his work certainly engages philosophy, it is closer to the classical and patristic kind, where theology is not a subject adjacent to philosophy, but its source, its mother, and its queen.
What I hope to explore is what I see as the centre of Malick’s cinema: the theophanic. Critics often speak of Malick’s engagement with the human condition or with nature, but they often miss that, for Malick, these are spiritual realities first. I don’t mean “spiritual” in the sense of something floating above nature. Nor do I mean pantheism. Rather, Malick’s cinema is sacramental: it brings together matter and spirit in such a way that the visible world contains something invisible, something real beyond itself.
In the introduction to Lily of the Field and Bird of the Air, Bruce Kirmmse compares Kierkegaard’s view of nature with Thoreau’s:
“Although both writers make use of nature in referring to what is beyond the immediately visible, we can see the contrast between Thoreau’s delight at earthly insularity and Kierkegaard’s focus not on what is empirical, but on something beyond nature... not on the earth, but on 'heaven'.”
That comparison sums up much of what I believe is lacking in most critical reflections on Malick. There is a near-obsession with his portrayal of nature and humanity’s place within it—but rarely do critics explore the sacramental, the transcendent, the spiritual longing that surges beneath it all.
Consider these lines from his films:
The Tree of Life (2011): “Nature… Finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, and love is smiling through all things.”
The Thin Red Line (1998): “Maybe all men got one big soul.”
Song to Song (2017): “To suffer binds you to something higher than yourself...”
To the Wonder (2012): “What is this love that loves us? That comes from nowhere.”
Malick is searching not only for beauty, but for the meaning within beauty—the heart of things. He is seeing life through a different lens—from the viewpoint of what the fathers of the church called the nous or the heart.
We should be cautious about making definitive claims regarding Malick’s faith. Though there are biographical and intellectual breadcrumbs, and moments of striking Christian imagery in his films, we cannot say with certainty where he lands theologically. What we can say is that he chose not to become a career philosopher—but a filmmaker. Not an academic in an office, but an observer of life, sculpting with time and painting with light. A philosopher of life.
I’ve titled this work Light from Light, drawn from the Nicene Creed, still recited every Sunday in but not limited to Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican liturgies:
“Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father…”
This is more than doctrinal poetry—it is a hermeneutic. A way of seeing the world, and in this case, of seeing Malick. His images suggest that all things shine with a hidden light. That nature itself is charged with grandeur. He does not point to a distant heaven, but reveals that heaven shimmers within the ordinary—through grief, through memory, through birth and decay.
In a letter to Martin Scorsese after viewing Silence (2016), Malick writes:
“One comes away wondering what our task in life is. What is it that Christ asks of us? And what new shapes will He assume in these dark times...?”
That is the voice not only of a Christian but of a contemplative. And it is the tone that permeates his films. He photographs life not to explain it, but to revere it. And when all his meditation is exhausted, he does what the saints and mystics have always done: he surrenders to the mystery.
“Someday we’ll fall down and weep, and we’ll then understand it all… All things.”
— The Tree of Life (2012)