Knight of Cups debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015, where it received mixed reviews. As with To the Wonder, there is a natural tendency to view it through the prism of The Tree of Life, as it expands on many of the same aesthetic, narrative, and visual devices, albeit within a much more contained narrative. While many of the same themes persist in Knight of Cups—alienation, fractured families, the contrast between natural beauty and the corruptions of human society, a search for spiritual fulfillment and love—the film’s setting in modern Hollywood marks it as a radical departure from Malick’s other films, all of which, with the exception of To the Wonder and parts of The Tree of Life, take place in the past and usually within rural or small-town settings. Large urban environments had appeared only in the present-day sequences in The Tree of Life via the enormous, glass-and-steel skyscrapers of downtown Houston, Texas.

Knight of Cups follows an alienated Hollywood screenwriter named Rick (Christian Bale) who has been “living the life of someone [he doesn’t] know” as he wanders through the modern-day Babylon of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, his past and present swirling together as he searches for some kind of spiritual and interpersonal fulfillment. The majority of the scenes take place in and around Hollywood backlots, enormous Beverly Hills mansions, neon-lit nightclubs, expensive hotel rooms, and Rick’s minimalist modern apartment. From time to time the emphasis on the urban is broken with evocative travelling shots of desert and mountain landscapes that feel even more powerful for their isolation. The film begins with the image of Rick walking alone in a desert landscape, a visual literalization of his character’s spiritual wandering in the wilderness that was similarly used in The Tree of Life, and it ends with a first-person perspective of a car barreling down a highway, suggesting that there is hope on the road ahead.

Breaking from the Judeo-Christian themes and imagery that dominated his earlier films, in Knight of Cups Malick turns to a different form of spirituality via the Tarot, which is more often than not associated with mysticism, the occult, and paganism. However, it is not particularly surprising that Malick would turn to Tarot imagery and terminology; according to Eden Gray in A Complete Guide to the Tarot, “The true Tarot is symbolism: it speaks a language that arises from the collective mind of Man,” which could almost double as a description for the philosophical goal of Malick’s cinema. The care from which the film draws its title depicts a stately, armored knight wearing a winged helmet (a symbol for imagination) and holding a cup in his outstretched hand while riding a horse toward a stream. The knight’s symbolic meaning, as described by Sylvie Simon in her book The Tarot: Art, Mysticism, and Divination, is an apt summation of Rick: “a wandering lover, messenger of hidden or repressed desires and violent passions. He is intensely secretive and mysterious…. Under a calm and charming demeanor, great ambition and intensity smolder. He is endowed with artistic talent. Though his company does not promise rest or ease, it can signal a renewal, particularly in the domain of love. He also augurs secrets given in confidence or new propositions revealed….. The Knight of Cups can signal an innovation or a romantic encounter or journey.” The Tarot deck also supplies the seemingly enigmatic titles of seven of the film’s eight chapters—“The Moon,” “The Hanged Man,” “The Hermit,” “Judgement,” “The Tower,” “The High Priestess,” and “Death”—with each referring to a character in the film or a development in Rick’s journey toward self-understanding. The eighth chapter, “Freedom,” is the only title not derived from the Tarot, thus reinforcing the sense that Rick has been successful in his inward journey.

Even more so than To the Wonder, Knight of Cups dispenses almost entirely with dialogue, relying instead on pure imagery and voice-over narration to tie the fragmented threads of the story together and offer some degree of narrative coherence as Rick attempts to move from darkness to light (Bale has virtually no dialogue in the film, other than what we hear in voice-over). Most of the action was improvised during production, with Malick supplying his actors with general situations and allowing them to work it out while the cameras rolled, which produces a film that is both naturalistic (at least in terms of the behaviors we see from the characters) and highly abstracted (in terms of how it was all assembled in the editing room). The cinematography by Malick regular and three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki is beautiful and evocative, at times transcendent in making the ordinary world of Los Angeles seem dreamlike, surreal, threatening, and liberating, sometimes all at the same time. Different aspects of Rick’s life, both personal and professional, merge and collapse, particularly his strained relationships with his overbearing father (Brian Dennehy), his rebellious brother (Wes Bentley), and his fleeting connections with a half a dozen women, which include his ex-wife (Cate Blanchett) and a married woman with whom he had an affair (Natalie Portman).

In this sense, Knight of Cups feels like a direct extension of and elaboration on To the Wonder, as it explores Rick’s spiritual crisis via his failed relationships with various women who represent different facets of the human experience. How you respond to it will depend largely on how you respond to Malick’s increasing experimental and abstract style of filmmaking. I came close to loving it, as I found its swirl of imagery and oneiric narrative flow quite intoxicating, if not always completely comprehensible. But, I imagine that’s the point. Like an elaborate painting or poem or piece of music, Malick’s films cannot come close to achieving their full impact on a single viewing. You don’t just watch them—you experience them, and each viewing rewards with a new and different experience. And the best thing I can say about Knight of Cups is that I can’t wait to experience it again.

[Note: Significant portions of this review have been adapted from “An Improbable Career: The Films of Terrence Malick,” a chapter I wrote for the forthcoming book Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick (Routledge, 2016).]

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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