A Hidden Life tells the true story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), farmers in the remote Austrian village of St Radegund. It is 1939, and fascism is sweeping the land. Adolf Hitler’s voice crackles through the hills over the wireless. When a group of Nazis arrive in the village seeking donations for the war effort, Franz turns them away. And when the villagers begin to greet each other with ‘Heil Hitler’, Franz does not reciprocate. Soon the town mayor is breathing down his neck, begging him to fall in line, and the local priest fears the consequences of Franz’s moral resistance. When Franz is conscripted and refuses to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler on his first day of service, he is handcuffed and becomes a prisoner of the Third Reich.

August Diehl and Reiner Bajo in A Hidden Life (photograph via Fox Searchlight Pictures)

While Fani is left to maintain their farm and family, grappling with her fellow villagers’ disdain, Franz is transferred to Tegel Prison in Berlin where he stands trial, threatened with execution. His lawyer advises him to take the oath and submit to service in the medical corps; his priest urges him to take the oath because ‘God judges what is in our hearts, not what we do’; even the bishop insists Franz has an obligation to the fatherland. Nazis and neighbours alike demand to know why Franz persists in his belief – is it pride? Vanity? A superiority complex?

On paper, this sounds like quintessential Oscars bait: a historical biopic about a conscientious objector, an everyday hero. But Malick’s films rarely concern themselves with rote dissemination of plot. Even at their most linear they feel like memories, following a dreamlike logic that eschews traditional causality and favours montage, an immersive wash of sound and imagery that conjures a place and time with startling realism but not quite perfect accuracy. A Hidden Life tells its story through texture, especially that of the natural world. Malick frames St Radegund as a tactile Eden: rich soil under fingernails, craggy mountains cloaked in fog, hillsides decked in golden meadow. The villagers’ work may be unglamorous, but it’s God’s work. Every action pertaining to the land is a pious act, and this sets up a powerful counterpoint to the Nazi incursion. Fascism and its inherent violence become further textural layers: the angular Nazi uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and architecture encroaching on the valley and its inhabitants’ way of life. The film presents war as a deeply unnatural act, a fundamental crime against the natural world – man-made, asymmetrical, and cruel.

The majority of the film’s dialogue comes in the form of letters between Franz and Fani, conveyed through voice-over, much of it taken verbatim from their real wartime correspondence. After a year in prison, Franz writes a letter to someone else, whom he addresses only as ‘You’ – an almighty You; the You that gives Franz his unwavering conviction.

Valerie Pachner in A Hidden Life (photograph via Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Malick’s films are spiritual ventures; every character is a vessel, every line a sermon, every obstacle a parable in waiting. But the God that fascinates Malick, and the God Franz writes to, is not the God propagated by humans. Malick is careful to remind us that the church is not impervious to the reigning power or dogma of the day; the bishop admits to Franz that they are melting down the cathedral’s bells to make bullets. A painter responsible for decorating the church roof with biblical murals confesses to Franz that all he does is conjure ‘sympathy and admirers’, providing the congregation with palatable images of a ‘comfortable Christ’. Perhaps one day, the painter muses, he will paint a ‘true’ Christ, one that conveys the real meaning of suffering. This is where Franz’s beliefs lie: in a God beyond institutions; the God he knows from the dirt, trees, orchards, and mountains, all shown to us in loving and breathtaking detail.

A quote from George Eliot provides A Hidden Life its title: ‘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’.

Malick’s film wholeheartedly sanctifies such a life. Franz Jägerstätter was no more a Hollywood hero than Terrence Malick is a blockbuster filmmaker. In the wrong hands, his story could have easily skewed toward a reductive endorsement of headline heroism. Instead, A Hidden Life exalts a quiet and essential goodness that grows from the soul, as if from the earth itself.

A Hidden Life (Fox Searchlight Pictures/Disney), 178 minutes, is directed by Terrence Malick.