Badlands (1973)
Before Terrence Malick became synonymous with whispered voiceover and golden-hour cinematography stretched across two-and-a-half hours, he made Badlands: a lean, sun-scorched debut that announced, with some confidence, that a genuinely unusual filmmaking voice had arrived. The film draws its bones from the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, who cut a trail of violence across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957 and 1958. That case had already lodged itself in the American cultural imagination by the time Malick sat down to write his script, and the late 1950s setting carries its own weight: the tail end of the Eisenhower era, a country caught between the tidy optimism of the postwar years and the turbulence that was already gathering. The "badlands" of the title are both a geographical reality and a fairly unsubtle moral metaphor, though Malick is shrewd enough never to labour the point.
Produced on a modest budget through the independent outfit Pressman-Williams, Badlands was the kind of film that could only have been made on the fringes of the Hollywood system, and it shows, in the best possible sense. Malick had spent time as a philosophy lecturer at MIT and a journalist before turning to screenwriting, and that background gives the film an unusual quality: it feels thought through rather than merely assembled. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (later of The Silence of the Lambs fame) shot much of it on location across Colorado and Montana, giving the wide-open American landscape a presence that amounts almost to a third character. If you have read Macca's thoughts on Malick's follow-up, Days of Heaven (1978), you will already have a sense of how that relationship between landscape and moral vacancy deepens across his early work. The film sits comfortably alongside other morally complicated pictures from that period, and fans of crime-tinged 1970s cinema might also find useful points of comparison in Macca's review of Dirty Harry (1971), a film equally interested in violence and the systems, or lack of them, that fail to contain it.
The two leads are what make the whole thing credible. Martin Sheen was twenty-two at the time of filming and carries the role of Kit with a studied, almost preening cool: he wears James Dean's ghost so consciously that the film seems to be commenting on that performance even as it uses it. Sheen had done stage work and television before this, but Badlands is where screen charisma and genuine unease met in him for the first time. Sissy Spacek, meanwhile, was making only her second feature appearance (three years before she would become a household name through Carrie (1976)), and the contrast between her Holly's placid, almost cheerful narration and the violence she witnesses is the film's central and most unsettling trick. Warren Oates and Ramon Bieri appear in smaller but well-drawn supporting roles, the kind of grounded, weathered performances that stop the film from floating entirely into myth.
There is a specific, haunting beauty to the American Midwest in the early 1970s, and Terrence Malick’s 1973 debut Badlands captures it with a chilling, poetic detachment.
Loosely based on a true story, this is the picture that effectively birthed a whole subgenre of cinema: the older, disaffected drifter and his impressionable teenage girlfriend embarking on a senseless killing spree. Yet, despite the countless imitators that have followed in its tyre tracks over the decades, Malick’s original vision retains a uniquely mesmerising, almost dreamlike quality that is impossible to ignore.
Visually, the scenery is absolutely beautiful, shot with a sun-drenched clarity that makes the vast, empty landscapes feel both liberating and deeply isolating. The soundtrack, peppered with period-appropriate tunes, is genuinely good, acting as a cheerful, ironic counterpoint to the grim reality unfolding on screen.
Fair play to Sissy Spacek, who is the undeniable heart of the film. Her performance is wonderfully understated, and she narrates the proceedings with a beautiful, detached innocence that perfectly encapsulates the naive absurdity of their situation. Martin Sheen, too, is remarkably effective as the James Dean-esque Kit, bringing a quiet, simmering menace to the role.
At its core, this is a profoundly tragic film about meaningless violence and the sheer apathy of youth. It serves as a sharp, if somewhat oblique, commentary on a generation rebelling against the stifling norms of society, treating murder with the same casual indifference as a Sunday drive. However, I must admit that for all its stylistic brilliance, the film didn't quite probe deep enough into the psychological machinery of its leads for my liking. I found myself wanting a bit more emotional weight behind their actions, rather than just observing their spree from a cool, cinematic distance.
Badlands remains a highly influential, visually stunning piece of American cinema. Malick crafted a cracking, atmospheric mood piece that prioritises tone and texture over traditional narrative momentum. It might leave you craving a bit more character depth beneath its gorgeous surface, but as a foundational text of 70s filmmaking, it is undeniably compelling.
Badlands remains a film that rewards return visits, not because it resolves its tensions but because it refuses to. Malick established here a template that dozens of road-crime pictures have borrowed from since, and the fact that so few of them have matched it says something about how precisely calibrated this one is, even with the reservations about character depth that Macca raises. At 94 minutes it does not overstay its welcome, which is perhaps part of the point: the whole thing is as casual and indifferent as the crimes it depicts. It is polished but unsettling, admired more than loved, and that gap between the two might be exactly where Malick intended to leave you.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1973 | Watched: 2026-07-31
Trailer
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