Terrence Malick’s Disciples
Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood
Paul Mescal in Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, 2025. Photo by Bruno Engler, courtesy Paramount Pictures
In the winter of 2024, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross released Nickel Boys, a masterful adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead. In a fragmentary, impressionistic style, the film portrays the friendship of two African American teens at a brutal Florida reform academy during the Jim Crow era. Acclaimed as a visionary movie, it ended up on many critics’ best-of-the-year lists and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Ross is a fiercely independent artist. His first film, the lyrical 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was also nominated for an Oscar. Afterward, he refused Hollywood’s overtures for years. So why did he take a meeting with the producers who reached out to him about making a studio-financed, big-budget adaptation of Nickel Boys? Ross’s explanation was simple: because one of them had produced Terrence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life. Ross’s reverence for Malick is plain in his films, which, like Malick’s, rely on extended montages of the everyday and do away with the conventional rules of cinematic storytelling, hovering instead between distant, melancholy reverie and hyperfocused, lived-in specificity. And he is not the only recent filmmaker who has fallen under Malick’s spell. Indeed, Malick’s sensibility, visual style, and working methods have had a profound influence on some of today’s best and most interesting directors.
Take Chloé Zhao, the director of the Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020). Her early films, all set in the American heartland, were regularly compared to Malick’s, and she herself pointed to The Tree of Life and Malick’s 2005 film, The New World, as influences on her 2021 Marvel superhero movie, Eternals. Those overtones persist in her latest, Hamnet, a film about the death of William Shakespeare’s only son and his subsequent creation of Hamlet. The movie may take place in Elizabethan England, but it is replete with lyrical passages and visions of nature that recall Malick’s work. The same is true of the director Clint Bentley’s newest film, Train Dreams, an adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella about the unremarkable life of a logger and railroad worker in the early years of the twentieth century. Weaving episodes from its character’s life into an elegiac collage that incorporates domestic bliss, harrowing tragedy, and melancholic resignation, Train Dreams—which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was quickly acquired by Netflix—unfolds across 102 minutes, yet seems to contain a whole world. Its protagonist, played by a reserved Joel Edgerton, is a simple man who occasionally questions his place in the universe but never understands it, save for a brief moment near the end when he takes a ride in an airplane—something he’s never done before—and, in one shining (and recognizably Malickian) instant, sees the shape of his life and feels something like transcendence.
Malick’s influence is intriguing in part because he is not an obvious choice for filmmakers to emulate. He has had, to be sure, a fascinating career: a publicity-shy Harvard philosophy grad, Rhodes Scholar, former MIT lecturer, and New Yorker writer, he made two brilliant and highly acclaimed films in the 1970s—the lovers-on-the-run drama Badlands and the visually striking romantic tragedy Days of Heaven—before stepping away from filmmaking for twenty years. In 1998, he returned with The Thin Red Line, a dreamy, diffuse adaptation of James Jones’s World War II novel, and followed that with two more ruminative epics: The New World, about the settlement of Jamestown and the romance between John Smith and Pocahontas, and The Tree of Life, a massive autobiographical film that frames a mid-century Texas coming-of-age tale against the spectacular origins of the universe and of life on Earth. His films since then have been less ambitious in scope but, in some ways, more stylistically bold. Many of Malick’s films have been critically acclaimed, and two have received Oscar nominations for Best Picture (albeit without much chance of winning). But none could be called box-office hits, and some have been savaged by critics. Indeed, thanks to his fondness for oblique storytelling, poetic voice-over, and overt spiritual themes, Malick’s oeuvre has become one of the more contentious in cinema. Each new release inspires debate over whether the film at hand is a deep, philosophical masterpiece or boring, pretentious drivel. Young directors looking for heroes tend not to gravitate toward divisive religious artists whose movies don’t make money or win awards. So what accounts for Malick’s impact on twenty-first-century American film?
Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick, 2011. Courtesy Fox Searchlight
particularly since his return to filmmaking, Malick has sought to reconnect American cinema to a lost spirituality, earnestly tackling questions about faith and the design of the world at a time when most mainstream cinema has avoided such topics. Malick is a devout Episcopalian. But the spirituality in his films is rarely illustrative or prescriptive. He doesn’t use religion as a cudgel or a doctrinaire superstructure with which to explain the world. Rather, he sees it as an inner light in people. In The Thin Red Line, for instance, soldiers, in voice-over, speak solemnly of inner longing. These otherwise inarticulate men’s voices read heartfelt love letters, or dabble in poetry, or edge their way into philosophical inquiries about the cruelty and redemptiveness of nature. A soldier remembers his mother reaching for an angel at the instant of her death; another recalls the serenity he experienced with his wife before he had to leave her behind. The effect is like eavesdropping on a kind of Emersonian oversoul. Malick endows even his most minor characters with humanity, which he views as a kind of holiness. Amid the gaunt and haunted faces of these soldiers, Malick finds grace. This kind of earnestness stood out in an age of relentless irony and snark. It served as a corrective to the glossy productions of Hollywood in its imperial phase, that period of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when budgets ballooned and American cinema, armed with state-of-the-art CGI and desperate to service a growing international market, became increasingly driven by fantasy spectacle and special effects. Malick’s films were a rebuke to even the hip grittiness of independent films of the era. He had an eye for light and an ear for music, he immersed viewers in color and texture, and he used his classical scores to underscore the glory of what he saw. Handcrafted, personal, achingly sincere, and at times proudly “flawed,” his pictures stood out against both the mainstream and the underground.
By the end, we are overwhelmed with emotion for this unremarkable life lived in near anonymity.
This proved irresistible for a certain kind of filmmaker frustrated with the options available to them. In 2000, for instance, the director David Gordon Green released George Washington, a drifting, multicharacter drama featuring young African American kids in a dead-end North Carolina steel town. Despite his impoverished setting, Green avoids miserabilist clichés and gives his characters a romantic grandeur. He takes their hopes and desires at face value. The title comes from the fact that one of the kids, named George, dreams of being president of the United States, a fact that Green does not treat with bitter irony or fashionable cynicism. Malick’s effect on George Washington is undeniable—rare was the review that didn’t mention the connection—and it is also clear in Green’s second feature, All the Real Girls (2003), an atmospheric and largely uneventful romance defined by the passions of the two shy lovers at its center. Noel (Zooey Deschanel) and Paul (Paul Schneider), like Malick’s characters in Badlands and Days of Heaven, are not extroverted or articulate. But Green’s film thrums with a visual splendor that reflects the characters’ longing, turning another depressed Southern town into a vibrant emotional landscape. Zhao’s films also highlight the great beauty of the otherwise unremarkable. Her masterpiece, 2017’s The Rider, follows a wounded rodeo cowboy (played by Brady Jandreau, a real-life rodeo star who sustained a career-ending head injury) from a Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota as he struggles with his inability to ride again. The film is made up of small moments, highlighting brief interactions and quotidian actions, but Zhao’s shooting and cutting, much like Malick’s, elevate these scenes toward the transcendent, finding a sacredness in the existence of a character who has lost his sense of purpose. The same could be said of Bentley’s Train Dreams, which follows a man with very little direction in the world: he’s an orphan, raised in poverty, who finds work as a logger and spends his years felling trees and building railroads. Though he sees racism and murder around him, he can do nothing about it. He finds happiness by starting a family but then loses that family to a raging wildfire. The film’s rhythms are not those of a typical drama; for all the squalls of guilt and grief, the movie moves with a steady cadence that suggests that the mysteries, tragedies, and glories of life are all part of the same thing. This seems like it would result in a cold, opaque film, yet by the end, we are overwhelmed with emotion for this unremarkable life lived in near anonymity, a life that is more like our own than we might want to admit. You can also see Malick’s philosophical influence in three films directed by Laura Dunn (all of which he produced): The Unforeseen (2007), about the dire social and environmental consequences of a mining company’s development of a vast patch of Austin real estate, Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (2016), about the life of the titular Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist, and All Illusions Must Be Broken (2024), about the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s ideas around the human denial of mortality and self-knowledge. In each, Dunn portrays a society that is fraying at the seams owing to its increasing disconnection from the natural world and the organic patterns of life. Her films avoid the density of political and philosophical jargon. Instead, they create meaning through images of ordinary people: children playing, adults working in the fields, reconnecting viewers with a different state of being. The films’ form embodies her overall thesis that, despite our endless efforts to deny it, we humans are not separate from nature but inextricably part of it.
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