Starring Christian Bale. Rated PG. Now playing.

There’s a tenuous connection between Tarot cards and everything that happens (or, more often, doesn’t happen) to the numb protagonist of this latest wedge of awkward cinematic poetry from Terrence Malick.

Christian Bale plays Rick, a screenwriter or director or something—we never see him or anyone else actually working. In Malickland, everyone simply drifts from place to place, via planes, classic cars, and a team of editors who chop ordinary experience into buckshot blasts of contrasting locations and moods. As Rick flits between Hollywood pool parties, desert sunsets, beachfront apartments, and Las Vegas playrooms, Bale masters a special kind of open-mouthed dismay. His indifference proves contagious.

The newly prolific filmmaker Malick has never been known for his ability to tell basic stories. The Tree of Life was anomalous in that it centred on a recognizably human Texas family. Even there, he seemed incapable of writing believable, let alone compelling conversation. In this one, he cheats the narrative by having everyone whisper improvised dialogue he can then layer randomly on the soundtrack. (Typical line: “Remember how happy we were?”)

Despite their eagerness to work with him, Malick has an uncanny ability to expose the limits of even the best performers. Playing Ricks’s various girlfriends in unspecified hunks of time, Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots, and Natalie Portman—the bastard!—engage in banal acting exercises that are then chopped up and reassembled to suggest the basics of life, love, and striking effective poses while a camera whirls around you.

Antonio Banderas, Cherry Jones, Wes Bentley, the disembodied voice of Ben Kingsley, and a gnomic Brian Dennehy also help populate this empty landscape. Did I mention that Fabio plays himself? Content very much aside, Malick’s combination of spectacular imagery (again courtesy cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) and sublime classical music (with Ralph Vaughan Williams setting the tone) has never been more ravishing. Knight of Cups is best taken, then, as a two-hour wash of audio-visual experience. Drugs mandatory, of course.