Synopsis
Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter faces the threat of execution for refusing to fight for the Nazis during World War II.
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Cast
- August DiehlFranz Jägerstätter
- Valerie PachnerFranziska "Fani" Jägerstätter
- Maria SimonResie
- Karin NeuhäuserRosalia Jägerstätter
- Tobias MorettiFr Ferdinand Fürthauer
- Ulrich MatthesLorenz Schwaninger
- Matthias SchoenaertsCaptain Herder
- Michael NyqvistBishop Joseph Fliessen
- Franz RogowskiWaldland
- Karl MarkovicsMayor of St. Radegund
Recommendations
- 100
The Playlist
The Tree of Life spanned eons to capture the entirety of existence, and while the filmmaker works on a tighter four-year canvas this time around, the feeling that the stakes are nothing less than the soul of all humanity has persisted. This is art of salvation. - 100
The Telegraph
A sombre spiritual war epic which surges up to claim its place among the director’s most deeply felt, sturdily hewn achievements. - 91
IndieWire
A Hidden Life is a lucid and profoundly defiant portrait of faith in crisis. - 91
The Film Stage
A Hidden Life is an invocation, the wrenching and unheeded plea of a man struggling to preserve his humanity intact as the world around him plunges deeper into evil, and worse, watches motionless and indifferent as said evil blossoms, spreads, and becomes normalized. - 90
Variety
Whether or not he is specifically referring to the present day, its demagogues, and the way certain evangelicals have once again sold out their core values for political advantage, “A Hidden Life” feels stunningly relevant as it thrusts this problem into the light. - 90
Los Angeles Times
Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state. - 80
Screen Daily
Terrence Malick often wrestles with the cosmic, the spiritual and the eternal, but with A Hidden Life, the meditative writer-director attacks his usual themes from a rewardingly timely and urgent perspective. - 60
The Guardian
Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.
