“There are two ways through life—the way of nature and the way of grace”. In Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, one of the protagonists offers us this reflection.
In a way, all of Terrence Malick’s films are a reflection on this truth, each one of them an essay on one or other way—or both.

We now await the release of what may well be his last film, a work on which we have little detailed information. It is one which he started filming as far back as 2019. It will, as far as we can tell, be the culmination of all his reflections on both nature and grace. Its working title is The Way of the Wind and is an epic focused on the life of Jesus Christ. We know that Géza Röhrig, the Hungarian poet and actor, is playing Jesus and Mark Rylance is portraying multiple versions of Satan. It is reportedly a non-traditional reproach to portraying Christ’s life with an emphasis on the parables and incidents from His time on earth.

At the time of writing no release date has been announced but there is speculation that it may be part of the Cannes programme for 2026 or 2027.

Malick’s entire oeuvre, as we said above, has focused on the trials of mankind in different ways. He began exploring our propensity to sink into the abyss of evil—Badlands (1973). More recently with Knight of Cups (2015) and Song to Song (2017) he stripped bare (literally, in some scenes) the corruption and moral wasteland of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Days of Heaven (1978) explored our tragic capacity to destroy our chances of an earthly happiness. The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005) explored epic historic events while with The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and A Hidden Life (2019) his focus moved firmly to a transcendental plane.

All of his films are visually beautiful, move slowly and poetically and have a narrative style—for the most part—which depends on reflective voice-over rather than standard dialogue. In this regard his reflective masterpiece—but they are all masterpieces in their own way—is The Tree of Life.

It is hard to describe The Tree of Life. One way to approach this work is to listen to those who have felt its influence and who worked on it and in it with Malick. He himself seldom, if ever, talks about his work and he never gives press conferences. He lets the compositions speak for themselves as serious music composers and poets do. In the book¹ from which the following quotations from his collaborators and others about Malick and his film are taken, its editors observe that The Tree of Life marked the beginning of a new phase of filmmaking for him. Working on the film, they say, pervaded the lives of his collaborators for years. “It became their world; a form of hypercinema that overflowed into their personal lives…”

In The Tree of Life, we find a family in Texas during the 1950s with a father, played by Brad Pitt, who loves directing his three sons towards a practical vision of life and a mother, Jessica Chastain, who, abandoning all such intent, becomes the embodiment of pure love and wonder. Jack (Sean Penn), the eldest son, now an adult, relives his childhood and the traumatic event that upends his family—the untimely death of his younger brother.

Chloé Zhao, who has just given us Hamnet, spoke in a New York Times interview about Malick’s work and his influence on her:

“Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and The New World—that is why we have art. It’s not trying to teach us something that we don’t know. It’s trying to help us remember who we are.”

Zhao echoes there what Jessica Chastain (Mrs O’Brien, who in the film spoke the opening quote of this article) has said of The Tree of Life and Malick’s work:

“Terrence Malick films are like life flowing. When I spent four months making the movie and then years doing voice-over for it, every time I saw the film I saw something new in it, and I discovered something that I didn’t know was there. So it is like a living, breathing entity that I believe in thirty years will still continue to live and evolve and grow and you will find something else that moves you and is a comment on our society.

“His films are so emotional—they are visual poems—it is not a film for entertainment; it’s not a film that you go to and turn your mind off; it’s like a piece of art: a painting that when you go and see it, you see yourself in it and that’s why you connect to it. I love this movie! It is more than a film: it’s an opera; a visual poem that I believe will just live on and on and every time we see it, we will learn something about ourselves.”

The producer Nick Gonda, who joined the team some months into the production says that he tries not to analyse the films or put his interpretation of the movie in the foreground, because in reality there is no right answer—it is so subjective. “When we were finishing the movie we would invite various people to see the film: I invited a priest, a rabbi, an atheist, a ninety-year-old and a fourteen-year-old and each of them was very moved by the film in completely different ways the characters spoke completely different stories to them.”

Sarah Green, also on the production team, described what she found to be one of the more beautiful aspects of this film… “for me is that it speaks equally to people with religious or spiritual beliefs and those without those beliefs. There are symbols from many faiths worked into the film and for those not looking in that direction, the exploration of nature and mankind works on its own.

“The Tree of Life is a symbol found in many religions and in Darwinism. I personally believe that faith and Darwinism are compatible, but not everyone agrees. We were really interested to know if, in fact, the film was speaking to those of other faiths or no faith and how different perspectives might inform one’s experience of it. The discussions were lively and fascinating and showed that the film was very wide in its reach. It’s funny to think about Terry talking about the meaning he ascribes to anything in the film. I believe he honours his audiences by allowing them the right to come to their own conclusions. I love hearing about what each person takes from the movie.”

Nick Gonda, again, says of the influence Malick has had on him and his artistic sensibilities. “He definitely attributes the fact that he works in the movies to the experience of watching his films when he was much younger, just a teenager.” Gonda relates how a very passionate teacher at his school would show them everything from Tarkovsky to Bresson and other European directors. In one semester he showed them both Badlands and Days of Heaven, stimulating a whole world of imagination, passion and inspiration.

“The Tree of Life,” he says, speaking of the range of its appeal, “works best if people bring themselves to the film where they bring their life, they open themselves up and the film becomes part of a greater meditation in which they find it to be a singular experience even in their lives.

“This is a film that is,” he continues, “in many ways, a reflection of the audience. It will play very differently to a mother than it would for a son, it will play very differently for somebody born in the 1950s than it does for someone born in the 1980s, the 1990s, or even more recently. So what I think is one of the most beautiful and magical things about this movie is that it is so varied. It’s one film—we call it The Tree of Life—but it is translated into a myriad of experiences for each person, and each experience is unique. Within that, obviously, there will be differences of opinion, because there will be people who aren’t as moved, because they didn’t watch it in this way and until they do, they won’t understand why others feel the way they do.”

We will leave the final very revealing words to Jessica Chastain, to sum up what is at the heart of The Tree of Life.

When reading the script she says that she understood that her character was a representation of grace, so to be a representation of grace is beyond being just a human being, it’s bigger than a human being, so expansive, representing something bigger than the universe. But she never thought when she was doing the scenes that it was meant to create a relationship with the origin of the universe.

“When I see that moment in the film” (a scene depicting dinosaurs and early life on the planet), “I end up seeing a moment of grace and compassion in nature, it is the beginning of grace in nature, absolutely.

“I was really, really glad to be part of the movie, I remember also talking with Al Pacino about that and he told me how much he loved Terry’s work. I felt a great responsibility. Every day before shooting I did a meditation. I would meditate on cultivating joy and cultivating gratitude before coming to the set, I would try and envision opening my heart to the world, I tried to do a lot of that, tried to do a lot of calming my mind and slowing down my modern energy and doing meditations on opening my heart.

“Terry was looking for something universal from my character, something out of time. The expression of an unselfish love, where sometimes in the love for nature, or for a husband, or in the primitive love between lovers, there is a sense of ‘me’, this is what ‘I want’; in a way it serves yourself. But with Mrs O’Brien it was a kind of love that didn’t serve her, a kind of love that was only for others, she would let go of herself, for the betterment of someone else. To me, it is the most beautiful form of love, and the most difficult to achieve, it is a pure love; it is explained a lot in Thomas Aquinas, writing about the difference between nature and grace—there is the way of grace, it’s a sense of always putting others before yourself.”

¹ Terrence Malick: Rehearsing the Unexpected, Daniele Villa, Faber and Faber, 2017

Posted on: 1 April 2026  in the  In Passing column in Position Papers (www.position papers.ie)