A Hidden Life

The Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter refuses to swear the oath of allegiance to Hitler. The whole village turns its back, the church tries to talk him round, his family pays the price. He does not change his mind. Terrence Malick directed. There is an important turn in his own history here: after years of improvisation he went back to working from a script. In his words, he had kept insisting he was working without one and had lately repented the idea. It is his first plot-driven film since The New World in 2005. The title comes from George Eliot's Middlemarch: unhistoric acts and hidden lives shape the way the world goes. Malick acquired the rights to Jägerstätter's prison letters and built the text on them. August Diehl and Valerie Pachner lead. It carries the final performances of both Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz. It premiered at Cannes in May 2019 and won both the François Chalais Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize. Fox Searchlight took US rights for between 12 and 14 million dollars. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 82 percent, Metacritic at 80. The gross stopped at 4.6 million. Who it is for: viewers drawn to stories of religious and moral resistance and to long, patient films. Who it is not for: anyone worn down by length and repetition. It runs close to three hours and puts the same dilemma into different mouths again and again.