A HIDDEN LIFE 

Review: Based on real events, Austrian peasant farmer Franz Jagerstatter, refuses to fight for the Nazis in World War II.
Director: Terrence Malick
Actors: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon, Tobias Moretti, Ulrich Matthes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Franz Rogowski, Karl Markovics, Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Wolfgang Michael, Johannes Krisch, Johan Leysen and Martin Wuttke
Year: 2019
Genre: Biography, Drama, History and Romance
Conclusion: 4/5
This story at the time was little known outside St. Radegund, and might never have been discovered. It was Gordon Zahn, an American who researched it and visited the village in the 1970s. He then published a biography called “In Solitary Witness”. A very slow moving drama which Terrence Malick specialises in. It took almost three years for Terrence Malick to edit this film. Each of the sequences are beautifully shot. What I really enjoyed the most was the amazing soundtrack by James Newton Howard. The only thing I have to say was that in the scenes with the priests I think the music should have stopped. It could have made those scenes more spiritual. I found it to be a very powerful story. This film did remind me in some-ways of the film Sophie Scholl (2005). The themes that this explores are conscience, defiance, religious institutions, war and love. The title of this film comes from an extract from the poem Middlemarch by George Eliot. “…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 owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Having watched this film I am really looking forward to his next project titled “The Last Planet“.