‘Terrence Malick’s Disciples’

Terrence Malick’s Disciples Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood Paul Mescal in Hamnet , directed by Chloé Zhao, 2025. Photo by Bruno Engler, courtesy Paramount Pictures In the winter of 2024, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross released Nickel Boys , a masterful adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead. In a fragmentary, impressionistic style, the film portrays the friendship of two African American teens at a brutal Florida reform academy during the Jim Crow era. Acclaimed as a visionary movie, it ended up on many critics’ best-of-the-year lists and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Ross is a fiercely independent artist. His first film, the lyrical 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening , was also nominated for an Oscar. Afterward, he refused Hollywood’s overtures for years. So why did he take a meeting with the producers who reached out to him about making a studio-financed, big-budget adaptation of Nickel Boys ? Ross’s explanation was simple: because one of them had produced Terrence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life . Ross’s reverence for Malick is plain in his films, which, like Malick’s, rely on extended montages of the everyday and do away with the conventional rules of cinematic storytelling, hovering instead between distant, melancholy reverie and hyperfocused, lived-in specificity. And he is not the only recent filmmaker who has fallen under Malick’s spell. Indeed, Malick’s sensibility, visual style, and working methods have had a profound influence on some of today’s best and most interesting directors. Take Chloé Zhao, the director of the Oscar-winning Nomadland (2020). Her early films, all set in the American heartland, were regularly compared to Malick’s, and she herself pointed to The Tree of Life and Malick’s 2005 film, The New World , as influences on her 2021 Marvel superhero movie, Eternals . Those overtones persist in her latest, Hamnet , a film about the death of William Shakespeare’s only son and his subsequent creation of Hamlet . The movie may take place in Elizabethan England, but it is replete with lyrical passages and visions of nature that recall Malick’s work. The same is true of the director Clint Bentley’s newest film, Train Dreams , an adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella about the unremarkable life of a logger and railroad worker in the early years of the twentieth century. Weaving episodes from its character’s life into an elegiac collage that incorporates domestic bliss, harrowing tragedy, and melancholic resignation, Train Dreams -which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was quickly acquired by Netflix-unfolds across 102 minutes, yet seems to contain a whole world. Its protagonist, played by a reserved Joel Edgerton, is a simple man who occasionally questions his place in the universe but never understands it, save for a brief moment near the end when he takes a ride in an airplane-something he’s never done before-and, in one shining (and recognizably Malickian) instant, sees the shape of his life and feels something like transcendence. Malick’s...

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