This film is like a monument to a largely unknown, silent hero: In breathtaking long shots and the most intimate moments of inner contemplation, veteran director Terrence Malick tells the real-life story of Upper Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl). After the occupation of Austria by Adolf Hitler's troops, the loving husband and father of three daughters steadfastly refuses to take the obligatory oath to the Wehrmacht and fight in it. When Jägerstätter is called up for military service in 1940, he is initially able to return to his wife (Valerie Pachner) on the farm after a few days due to officially documented indispensability. When another call-up follows, the convinced pacifist refuses and in 1943 declares his refusal to do military service with a weapon due to his religious beliefs. It was not only the nationalist villagers, Jägerstätter's lifelong companions and friends, who met his resistance with contempt and exclusion - the staunch Christian was also threatened with imprisonment, trial and a death sentence by the authorities. His sacrifice would benefit no one. Jägerstätter hears this early on... Malick spent three years working on his deeply poetic plea not to allow evil to take over one's belief in what one considers to be good and right. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer (“The Invisibles”) has clothed this allegory of Jesus in beguilingly beautiful images that are simply stunning and lend this drama of resistance a universal truthfulness. This ravishingly beautiful and at the same time deeply moving portrait of an unknown hero was not only invited to the Cannes competition, but also garnered rave reviews worldwide. In addition to August Diehl and Bruno Ganz (in his last role), this late work about followership, nationalism and the courage to stand up to injustice is also starring well-known actors from Germany and Austria: Tobias Moretti, Alexander Fehling, Valerie Pachner, Ulrich Matthes, Sophie Rois, Jürgen Prochnow, Ulrich Matthes, Franz Rogowski, Mark Waschke, Karl Marovics and many more. They all help to bring this “hidden life” into the bright light of the screen and thus into the public eye. “He is the greatest invisible man in world cinema since Stanley Kubrick. The publicity-shy American filmmaker Terrence Malick gave his last interview in 1973, but what he said back then about his formative influences still applies to his work [...]: “They are always stories in which innocence is confronted with a threat that is greater than itself.” In his latest film, the 76-year-old throws this oversized field of conflict back onto the horror of reality: the biography of an Austrian conscientious objector during the Second World War. [...] The three-hour masterpiece “A Hidden Life” is a fascinating foreign body in contemporary cinema. Like few filmmakers, Malick sculpts time like a sculptor. Malick's first film, “Badlands”, already told of the country as a lost paradise. The concept of homeland, sullied by nationalism, is probably the grimmest expression of this. The fact that it is celebrating a comeback today gives this film an unexpected topicality.” (Daniel Kothenschulte, in: “Frankfurter Rundschau”) “In Terrence Malick's films, the gaze is often directed towards the sky. As if his protagonists were looking there for an answer to their earthly woes. The overhead view has become a trademark, as have the fluid, multi-perspective camera movements that cut into one another, in which no clear narrative subject can be discerned. The disembodied voices of Malick's protagonists seem to float above the images, having become one with nature. [...] Malick's pathos is overwhelming, but it is not the glorification of the hero that makes “A Hidden Life” so moving. Jägerstätter is no hero, no resistance fighter like the Scholl siblings, Georg Elser, Stauffenberg or Bonhoeffer. Like Malick, politics is far from his mind. [...] Franz's dialog with the restorer of the village church plays a key role here. The old man is repairing the religious ceiling frescoes, giving them a fresh coat of paint. “I help people to look up and dream,” he explains his work. People would look up and feel transported back to the time of Christ. “They imagine that they would have acted differently to his contemporaries back then.” The thin varnish of the ceiling frescoes only barely conceals the bitter truth, the weakness of mankind. But the modern fresco painter Terrence Malick would probably no longer make films if he did not also believe in the good in people. (Andreas Busche, in: Der Tagesspiegel)