Fragmented sexuality in Malick’s To the Wonder, Knight of Cups,& Song to Song

By Thomas Mirus and James Majewski ( bio - articles - email ) | May 15, 2025 | In Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

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After the artistic triumph of his magnum opus The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick had an unwontedly prolific period, releasing To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017). In these films, known informally as the “Weightless Trilogy”, Malick took his previous formal experimentation even further, relying heavily on improvisation stitched together with a stream-of-consciousness editing style evoking the fragments of memory. The results are undeniably aesthetically exciting, but also critically divisive, as many viewers find the latter two films particularly to lack narrative substance.

The films have been of special interest to many Christians because of their explicit allusions to faith and their depiction of the emptiness of worldly pleasures as the characters search for something more. To the Wonder in particular is noteworthy for its priest character played by Javier Bardem, and because it deals with the issue of contraception and how being closed off to children destroys a relationship (the importance of children being a theme in all three films).

Across the trilogy, Malick deals with the topic of sexuality in a way seen nowhere else in modern Hollywood, consistently showing the breakdown of sexuality in excess, deviance, and using others as destructive and even sinful. In that and in other respects, the films are profoundly countercultural, even prophetic.

However, this is dangerous material to handle in any medium, cinema above all. Malick is not always successful in threading the needle with chastity in execution, however praiseworthy his thematic intentions. This makes it impossible to recommend these films for a wide viewership, or to anyone without caveats. Nonetheless, a discussion of these films, with all their strengths and weaknesses, is essential in considering the direction of religious cinema today—and in this episode Thomas Mirus, James Majewski, and Nathan Douglas do just that.

Note: YouTube has censored versions (TV-14, blurred nudity and bleeped profanity) of Knight of Cups and Song to Song, for free with ads.

Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com