As the man, so his work is difficult to capture and summarize. Here I will do my best.

Instead of dialogue, Malick often uses the camera alone. Images speak for the narrative. John Smith and Pocahontas wrestle extensively in the eastern seaboard grasses, then the shot cuts and holds on a flowing stream. In the theater as a high schooler, I was bored by this. Watching it again, I ponder the whole flavor of America. 

Instead of a script, he directs his actors to interact and even improvise their lines. Auditions for leads in A Hidden Life sat together and silently cut apples as their tryout. Paparazzi see him filming Christian Bale and various girlfriends wandering around Las Vegas, with no set and no lighting. Those shots were actual scenes in a final cut. Sometimes the camera rolls for over a half hour with no direction, to capture true-to-life moments. “He’s like a guy with a butterfly net waiting for the truth to go by,” Brad Pitt said of him. There is a famous scene in Thin Red Line when the pessimist Penn asks Caviziel, “You still believing in the beautiful light are you? How do you do that? You’re a magician to me.” He replies, “I still see a spark in you.” It was all unscripted and an extension of their actual faith-doubt conversations at the bar over those months, and Malick was looking for just that kind of moment to capture, written by them and not him.

His movies have a narrator throughout because our lives do, that stream-of-consciousness we cannot stop. I was able to see Christopher Nolan interviewed at the Library of Congress back in 2017. He spoke of Star Wars as his childhood influences. When asked of contemporary ones, he said Malick, because Malick taught him to develop real characters by way of their memories narrated throughout.  

Instead of a soundtrack, his movies are a canvas for his lifetime of classical music tastes. Respighi colors a couple’s honeymoon years. Tavener’s “Funeral Canticle” intones grief for a lost brother. Wojciech Kilar’s “Exodus” plays seven times in a film every time a new girlfriend enters and promises escape. 

Then comes philosophy. His references are more than the constant thought of death, which many cite as Heidegger’s influence. Plato’s Phaedrus is quoted, the description of how the soul used to have wings, while a listless Los Angeles couple are at the aquarium. Rousseau’s noble savage idea is refuted when Caviziel escapes the army and visits the paradise of a Solomon Island tribe and sees skin diseases and skulls on their living room shelves.

The Knights of Columbus gave him an IMAX grant to make a “family friendly film.” He dispatched camera teams across the globe and used that footage instead for nature and evolution sequences in The Tree of Life. They later called him on it, so he hastily put together a documentary on the birth and death of the universe. Brad Pitt narrates, and at one point he lists out all things, from mountain ranges to a mere atom, searching for a verb to describe what they all do all the time. “Blazing,” he says. Reality is blazing forth and is worth our attention in detail, Malick reminds us.   

An enduring theme is that of his unfinished doctoral work at Oxford: our concept of the world around us. This is lava meeting the cold sea, but it is also the sustained shot of the streetlamp in suburban Oklahoma in the evening, or looking into a living room from the yard outside. In To The Wonder, the couple is raging in their living room, then the shot breaks to a coral reef and a sea turtle swimming by. The narrator says, “Which is the truth? What we know up there or down here?” In his script for Tree of Life, he twice laments that we moderns live under roofs and have shut out the stars! All the universe is connected and must be considered as such. The script reads in one section: “A child; the similarity in form between the shape of his ear and that of an oyster shell, between the cowlick at the crown of his head and a galaxy… A rose, unfolding. Life surpassing itself.”

Just as he meditates on earth, so also heaven. The script ends like Dante’s Divine Comedy at a loss for actually picturing heaven. Instead he limits himself to its shore, actors all happily reuniting on the beach of the Great Salt Lake. Then the image of a bridge to another land. Then cut. In other films, paradise is sought. Olga Kurylenko addresses God repeatedly as, “Love that loves us.” Caviziel embraces death in the jungle with a joyful and godlike gleam in his eye. False paradise is also shown for what it is. Song to Song wryly plays on the Biblical title as Natalie Portman’s exaltation from diner waitress to Austin highrise results in the opposite of paradise. She stares in disbelief at the prostitute that Fassbender pays to join them in bed, and she is later found by him face down in his swimming pool. 

Terrence Malick considers everything in life and death, and for this, he is Hollywood’s only contemplative. His style is entirely his own, and it seems he’s fine with that. Still, he is in dialogue with others of his craft. A Hidden Life, which is also in dialogue with Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, was written in response to Scorsese’s movie on Jesuit missionaries, Silence. Malick saw the film, asked the director in a letter, “What is it that Christ asks of us?” and then went on to make a better film in response.