To the Wonder

Terrence Malick
StudioCanal

To the Wonder can simply be described as a search for love. Terrence Malick’s latest consideration on passion, isolation, soulfulness and the maelstrom of the human psyche uses landscape and weather as metaphors for changes in emotion and mood. It’s a masterpiece of miscommunication as Neil (Ben Affleck) vacillates between Marina (Olga Kurylenko), the woman he met in France – a free-wheeling, elemental single mother – and Jane (Rachel McAdams), the hometown lass who is a hangover from his youth.

Modern Americana is set against the timelessness of Europe as Malick debates the nature of romance and true love. Is it merely a concept that all of us secretly accept is unachievable? Is Mankind destined to pursue such a notion forever – chasing a collective dream of perfection? Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) as a priest lost within his own crisis of faith may hold the answers – for others if not for himself. A poetic, ethereal treatise on the realities of messed up love, To the Wonder presents the extraordinary journeys taken by ordinary people as they blunder blindly through life.

Tony Earnshaw