Malick’s second film about the second world war is a high-minded hymn to modern saint that never quite comes to life
Terrence Malick’s heartfelt and reverently high-minded new movie is inspired by a life that is little-known — hidden, perhaps. Franz Jägerstatter was an Austrian conscientious objector during the second world war who made a personal stand for his anti-Nazi beliefs by refusing to take the Hitler oath as a Wehrmacht conscript and in 1943 was duly executed.
August Diehl (who played the lead in Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx) is Jägerstatter; Valerie Pachner is his wife Franziska, and there are cameos from Matthias Schoenarts as Jägerstatter’s defence lawyer and the late Bruno Ganz as the military tribunal president who sorrowingly questions Jägerstatter about what he sees as the stubbornness and futility of his beliefs before reluctantly passing the terrible sentence of death.