---
title: "A Hidden Life"
year: 2019
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/a-hidden-life"
fi1m_score: 82
critics_score: 74
critics_reviews: 29
published: "2026-09-17T09:17:12.739680+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-17T09:17:13.227555+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# A Hidden Life (2019)

Directed by Terrence Malick · 2h 53m · MPA PG-13 · History, Drama, War

**Fi1m score: 82** · Critics 74 from 29 reviews

*In a sentence:* Nearly three hours over an oath, and the time in the fields is never the problem

> Terrence Malick makes a farmer’s resistance to Hitler deeply affecting by attending to the marriage it endangers. August Diehl and Valerie Pachner hold our attention, even when the film repeats a point we have already understood.

## Synopsis

In the Austrian village of St. Radegund during the Second World War, Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) works the land with his wife, Fani Jägerstätter (Valerie Pachner). Scythes move through the fields; the couple share the work and their life at home. As Nazi rule demands obedience, the farmer wants to remain faithful to his conscience without abandoning his family. He refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler. Fr Ferdinand Fürthauer (Tobias Moretti) belongs to a church that offers little support for resistance. His refusal puts the life they have made together at risk.

## Review

Terrence Malick’s *A Hidden Life* is a moving account of resistance that sometimes takes longer than it needs to. Franz Jägerstätter is an Austrian farmer whose objection to swearing loyalty to Hitler puts his ordinary life under intolerable pressure. The film asks what such a decision costs within a marriage, where a private conviction cannot remain private for long. Across 173 minutes, it keeps returning to the life he wants to continue living with his wife, giving us good reason to care about what happens to them.

Jörg Widmer’s wide-angle images give the fields and mountains an imposing presence, but the useful detail is often a body moving through them. The rhythmic scything matters because we can see the effort involved in maintaining this apparently peaceful life. The camera’s movement makes the rural passages feel inhabited, even when the scenery is being offered for admiration. Sebastian T. Krawinkel’s production design is persuasive in these working spaces: the farm has a purpose beyond providing a pleasing background. We believe that people live and labour here.

August Diehl is convincing as a man who does not consider his conscience negotiable, though the writing gives him relatively little uncertainty to play. Valerie Pachner, as Fani Jägerstätter, makes the marriage feel equal, allowing affection to coexist with the strain of sharing the consequences of someone else’s decision. We were moved by their tenderness amid the farm work, because being accustomed to one another makes the prospect of separation so painful. James Newton Howard’s music is most persuasive here, lending warmth to the shared life that the couple are trying to preserve.

The treatment of church and state gives the film some welcome anger. Franz Jägerstätter takes his faith seriously, yet religious authority offers little support when that faith brings him into conflict with Nazi rule. Terrence Malick does not let the church off for that failure. Nor does he require us to share the farmer’s beliefs: the wish to go on working beside his wife is easy enough to understand.

The difficulty is that the farmer’s steadfastness becomes an excuse for dramatic repetition. Editors Joe Gleason, Sebastian Jones and Rehman Nizar Ali let scenes overlap and return to familiar images until another stretch of questioning adds little to what we already know. There is value in making us sit with an uncomfortable decision, but some passages leave us waiting for the film to move on. August Diehl can suggest resolve without explaining it again, and Terrence Malick too often supplies another explanation anyway. The film has already shown how much the couple stand to lose.

Do not come to it expecting a war film driven by combat. A man declining an oath gives a director no obvious spectacle, and Terrence Malick has the confidence to spend his time on the life that makes the refusal difficult. The farm work deserves the attention, even when the repeated questioning does not. Set aside an uninterrupted evening, with some tolerance for being told something important more than once.

*Fi1m score 82, published 17 September 2026.*

## What the critics say

Most critics welcome A Hidden Life as a return to more focused storytelling for Terrence Malick, finding his familiar style well suited to a conscientious objector’s resistance to Nazism. Praise centres on the images of rural labour, landscape and ordinary domestic life, which give the questions of faith and conscience a physical setting. The warmer reviews find emotional force in the marriage and moral urgency in the refusal to serve an evil regime.

The spread is wide, however, with the nearly three-hour length and repeated imagery testing even some sympathetic critics. The central disagreement concerns how fully the film explores its protagonist: admirers find spiritual depth, while detractors see a saint whose certainty leaves little room for drama. The Hollywood Reporter argues that the beauty flattens the material rather than revealing his inner life; Film Comment objects to the narrow historical scope and limited attention to the Holocaust.

### Reviews we read (29)

- **Little White Lies**, Sophie Monks Kaufman (5/5/4): The critic celebrates the film's rhapsodic portrayal of private moral resistance and an equal, soul-deep love story amid encroaching fascism, praising its emotional resonance and spiritual depth. [Read](https://lwlies.com/reviews/a-hidden-life)
- **The Telegraph** (5/5): Malick has found the inspiration for his best picture in years with this sombre spiritual war epic about one man’s refusal to fight. It is a sober, truthful, powerfully unadorned portrait of an unpretentious martyr and his strong wife. [Read](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/hidden-life-reviewterrence-malicks-best-picture-years/)
- **Empire**, Ian Freer (90/100, inferred): Malick is back on historical ground with the most engaged and urgent work in ages, rooting his style in moral reality and using history to pose relevant questions about evil leadership. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/a-hidden-life/)
- **Evening Standard**, David Sexton (90/100, inferred): Malick returns to a well-ordered script for the true story of a conscientious objector, delivering a rhapsodic and prayerful work that is a justification of his late style and an act of worship. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/cannes-2019-a-hidden-life-review-an-exquisite-work-of-genius-a4146306.html)
- **Los Angeles Times**, Justin Chang (90/100, inferred): The critic calls it Malick’s strongest film in nearly a decade and a return to form, a poem and polemic that embodies its subject’s pacifism. It singles out the forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state amid the Austrian farmer’s conscientious objection. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2019-12-12/hidden-life-review-terrence-malick)
- **RogerEbert.com**, Matt Zoller Seitz (90/100, inferred): The critic calls the film one of Malick’s finest and most demanding works, a nearly three-hour philosophical summation of his career that rewards close attention. It singles out the extraordinary attention paid to mundane physical details of work, nature, and daily life as the element that makes the story an epic. [Read](https://rogerebert.com/reviews/a-hidden-life-movie-review-2019)
- **Sight and Sound**, Richard Combs (90/100, inferred): The critic highlights Malick's sensuous historical reverie evoking a harmonious rural way of life destroyed by war, framing the story as a battle between good and evil through images of the physical and spiritual realms. [Read](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/hidden-life-review-terrence-malick-stages-battle-between-good-evil-austrian-hamlet)
- **Total Film** (90/100, inferred): Malick is back with a spiritual WWII story that deserves to be held in the same regard as his finest work. [Read](https://www.gamesradar.com/terrence-malick-is-back-with-spiritual-ww2-movie-a-hidden-life-a-film-to-hold-in-the-same-regard-as-his-finest-work/)
- **IndieWire**, David Ehrlich (85/100, inferred): Malick returns with a shatteringly powerful story of faith in crisis that stands as his best film since The Tree of Life. [Read](https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick-cannes-1202142833/)
- **Financial Times**, Danny Leigh (80/100, inferred): Malick confronts real darkness in this portrait of a wartime pacifist, bringing a spiritual dimension and resulting in his best film in years despite the familiar stylistic tics. [Read](https://www.ft.com/content/ad19ea90-37a9-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4)
- **Radio Times**, Karen Krizanovich (4/5): The critic praises the film's vivid immersion in ordinary existence, morality and conscience, noting its evocative cinematography and timely message that history pivots on unhistoric acts. [Read](https://www.radiotimes.com/movie-guide/b-tyiyp1/a-hidden-life/)
- **Time Out**, Phil de Semlyen (4/5): The critic calls it Malick's best film in years for its disciplined storytelling, urgent philosophising and raw power alongside signature visuals, while noting a slightly laboured Christ metaphor in the second half. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/a-hidden-life)
- **Vulture** (80/100, inferred): Malick takes on the evils of history in a more linear, philosophical mode that uses movement, wide-angle visuals, and everyday moments to convey one man's act of resistance and its personal cost. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/2019/12/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malicks-new-movie.html)
- **Screen Daily** (70/100, inferred): The critic notes the film's urgent take on standing up to tyranny through a Christ-like martyr figure, admiring its melancholy reflection on the limits of individual righteousness while acknowledging its familiar Malick style. [Read](https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/a-hidden-life-cannes-review/5139660.article)
- **Slant Magazine**, Sam C. Mac (70/100, inferred): The film is a lyrical but uneven pean to moral purity and one man's crisis of faith and country, pushing Malick's inquiry further even as its form occasionally verges on the monotonous. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review-a-hidden-life-lyrically-attests-to-a-mans-quest-for-moral-purity/)
- **The Independent** (70/100, inferred): Malick has found a subject worth getting close to in the true story of an Austrian farmer who refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler. The film bravely asks how one retains innocence in dark times, though it is guilty of incessant questioning. [Read](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick-director-cast-nazi-austria-a9282651.html)
- **The New York Times**, A.O. Scott (70/100, inferred): The critic finds the film gorgeous and at times frustrating, praising its embrace of beauty while noting how the arguments and meaning of Franz’s defiance slide across overlapping scenes. It singles out the way the story examines the provocative refusal to swear loyalty to Hitler as both personal and philosophical. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/movies/a-hidden-life-review.html)
- **The AV Club**, Mike D'Angelo (C+): The film offers a hagiographic portrait of unwavering moral certitude with little internal doubt or drama, relying instead on stunning scenery and repetitive visual affectations. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/there-s-little-doubt-or-drama-in-terrence-malick-s-3-ho-1840393712)
- **The Times**, Tom Shone (★★★): Three hours of soul-searching against breathtakingly cloud-enshrouded mountains yields treasures like rhythmic scythe movements and tender moments, but the figure of Franz has nothing to transcend and the film suffers from monotony. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/article/film-reviews-bombshell-a-hidden-life-9p6qvb8pn)
- **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (50/100, inferred): Malick's high-minded hymn to a modern saint never quite comes to life despite its serious intent. The director's signature ecstatic style encloses the conscientious objector in a hermetically sealed environment of heightened awareness. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/19/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malicks-rhapsody-to-an-austrian-conscientious-objector)
- **Film Comment**, Sheila O'Malley (30/100, inferred): The film is a meditation on faith and belief in God in a lunatic world, centered on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter's conscientious objection. It limits its scope by focusing on one man's spiritual protest in an isolated village, barely addressing the Holocaust, which weakens its power compared to Malick's other political films. [Read](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-big-screen-a-hidden-life/)
- **The Hollywood Reporter**, Todd McCarthy (30/100, inferred): Malick delivers an indulgent three-hour study of the conscientious objector that beautifies and flattens the material while avoiding deep exploration of the character's moral and religious inner life. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/a-hidden-life-review-1212083/)
- **The New Yorker**, Richard Brody (30/100, inferred): The critic finds the film aridly theoretical and impersonal, a giant stumbling into self-parody with grandiosity that overwhelms the story’s noble specificity. It singles out the illustrative, effortful imagery and Central Casting Nazis as elements that turn the resistance narrative into a vague, bombastic exercise. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/when-bad-nazis-happen-to-good-directors-terrence-malicks-a-hidden-life)
- **Deadline**, Pete Hammond (90/100, inferred): The critic calls it a masterpiece and says Malick is back in top form with an inspiring story of resistance to Hitler and Nazi Germany. The film is praised for serving a strong narrative with its true tale of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter. [Read](https://deadline.com/video/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick-movie/)
- **The Wrap**, Steve Pond (90/100, inferred): The critic says Malick gets his mojo back with this World War II drama, anchored in story in a way his recent movies have not been. It is hailed as the director’s most monumental work since “The Tree of Life,” a luminous and substantial addition to his filmography. [Read](https://www.thewrap.com/a-hidden-life-film-review-is-this-where-terrence-malick-gets-his-mojo-back/)
- **Consequence**, Clint Worthington (85/100, inferred): The critic praises the film as Malick working at his peak, delivering a straightforward and spiritually rewarding meditation on God, morality, and steadfast conviction against fascism through rich visuals and a simple, compelling story. [Read](https://consequence.net/2019/12/film-review-with-a-hidden-life/)
- **Polygon**, Karen Han (75/100, inferred): The critic notes that the film proves Malick still has his mojo with gorgeous imagery and a more linear story about doing what is right, though it can feel somewhat shallow on subtext; the lead performances are compelling. [Read](https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/20/18631794/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick-cannes-2019/)
- **/Film**, Jason Gorber (6.5/10): The critic finds the film beautiful yet overlong and confounding, stretching a thin narrative over three hours with repetitive imagery. They single out the pastoral beauty and composition for admiration while noting complications in its portrayal of Nazis and historical representation. [Read](https://www.slashfilm.com/566528/a-hidden-life-review/)
- **Collider**, Gregory Ellwood (C): The critic finds the film repetitive and aimless despite its beautiful visuals, suggesting it could lose an hour to tighten the narrative, though the final section is more compelling. The screenplay gives little depth to the lead actors. [Read](https://collider.com/a-hidden-life-review-terrence-malick/)

## Details

- **Director:** Terrence Malick
- **Director:** Terrence Malick
- **Writer:** Terrence Malick
- **Cinematography:** Jörg Widmer
- **Editor:** Rehman Nizar Ali, Sebastian Jones, Joe Gleason
- **Music:** James Newton Howard
- **Production design:** Sebastian T. Krawinkel
- **Costume design:** Lisy Christl
- **Producer:** Josh Jeter, Dario Bergesio, Marcus Loges
- **Cast:** August Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter; Valerie Pachner as Fani Jägerstätter; Maria Simon as Resie; Karin Neuhäuser as Rosalia Jägerstätter; Tobias Moretti as Fr Ferdinand Fürthauer; Ulrich Matthes as Lorenz Schwaninger; Matthias Schoenaerts as Captain Herder; Michael Nyqvist as Bishop Joseph Fliessen
- **Runtime:** 2h 53m
- **Certificate (MPA):** PG-13
- **Release (the US):** 13 December 2019
- **Genres:** History, Drama, War
- **Budget:** $9 million
- **Box office:** $5 million
- **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXmdY4lVR0

## Where to watch in the US

- Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, uhd
- Apple TV: rent $3.99, hd
- Amazon Prime Video: buy $19.99, uhd
- Apple TV: buy $19.99, hd

*Checked 2026-09-17.*

Also available in: AE, AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, HU, IE, IT, JP, KR, LT, MX, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PL, RO, SE, TR, US, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country.

## If you liked this

- *Of Gods and Men* (2010), Fi1m 84: Shared work and religious conviction make the prospect of violence painfully personal. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/of-gods-and-men.md)
- *The Ascent* (1977): A harsher wartime test of conscience, with little comfort for anyone involved.
- *A Man for All Seasons* (1966): Another dangerous oath, approached through argument, procedure and a stubbornly independent conscience.
- *The Tree of Wooden Clogs* (1978): Farm labour and family routines receive the patient attention usually reserved for heroes.
- *Silence* (2016): Religious duty becomes painfully complicated when other people must bear its consequences.

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/a-hidden-life