Days of Heaven. Not to be confused with Days of Thunder (Malick, 1978)

Chicago reprobate Bill, his lover Abby (who poses as his sister) and his actual sister Linda harvest crops on the Texas Panhandle in 1916. A wealthy farmer with the soulful eyes of Sam Shepard falls in love with Abby and proposes marriage. Simmering emotional tension and then violent emotional outbursts ensue.

Days of Heaven mirrors Malick’s debut film, Badlands, in that it follows a violent tempered man who is beloved by an innocent woman rendered guilty by her compliance with evil. In both films, the actions of the man is viewed obliquely, through the prosaic yet poetic voice-over of a teenaged girl (in Heaven, this is provided by the man’s younger sister. His ACTUAL sister, not the fake-sister lover, mind). Heaven feels like the more-melancholy, more-taciturn twin sister of Badlands. I will stop mentioning sisters now; it’s getting confusing.

The film thrums with an undercurrent of volatile passion, though there is a curious reserve when observing the feelings of the three lovers. In moments of heated argument the words cut out, and the violence occurs accompanied by over-powering music. I have read some critiques of the film that claims this keeps the audience at arm’s length and dampens the emotion. I completely disagree, and found this technique instead showed Malick understands his audience will intuit emotional nuances themselves. So much of Days of Heaven’s romantic plot is told through simmering looks, loaded pauses – that when this tension is released in argument and aggression words aren’t needed to explain. It’s all rudimentary human nature.

That sense of threat and its transformation into sudden violence is mirrored through the natural elements in the film. Early on shots of animals in the undergrowth are juxtaposed with shots of the blades of the combine harvester bearing perilously close to them. Towards the film’s conclusion, the wheat crops are disastrously set upon by locusts, shortly before the love triangle devolves into a catastrophe of a different sort.

The locusts are biblical-styled portent, clearly, and the plot itself is cribbed wholesale from the Old Testament (see: Abraham, Sarah, and the Pharoah. Abraham’s kind of a cock, yo). These ye-olde elements lend what is a slight narrative a deeper resonance: this seems to be a tale told out of time. Brutality is endemic in human nature and in the natural element now as it always has been.

But enough flim-flam. The most important thing you need to know, if you haven’t seen it, is that this is a stone-cold-gorgeous fucking film. Much of it was shot during the mythical ‘golden hour’ – the misnomered 25-minutes or so before the sun sets each day. The images are all dipped in amber honey, this is a film you could easily watch with the sound off and an accompanying Pink Floyd album and only be marginally irritated by the terrible fucking racket playing as you watched the pretty pictures.