Directed by Terrence Malick. In English and German, with English subtitles. Rated PG

A Hidden Life is Terrence Malick’s first period piece since 2005’s The New World, and second visit to World War II after 1998’s The Thin Red Line. In a sense, his films are all historically based, whether trading on his own childhood, as the son of Syrian-Christian immigrants who ended up in Texas, or going back to a time before humans arrived (both in The Tree of Life).

After his breakthrough Days of Heaven in 1978, it was two full decades before Malick directed again, and he has subsequently eschewed naturalistic dialogue in favour of swoony montages with characters’ thoughts conveyed in detached voice-over narration, not always matched with the scene being shown. Here, he takes both approaches in the relatively (for him) straightforward tale of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer whose Catholic piety made him refuse military service for the Nazis who annexed his nation in 1938.

He’s played by Berlin-born August Diehl, who was a slimy SS man in Inglourious Basterds and, conversely, the title character in The Young Marx. In real life, Jägerstätter was a rangy, semiliterate bad boy who made waves with the first motorcycle in his tiny Alpine village, which looks like something from The Sound of Music.

The man’s innate religiosity deepened when he married the devout Fani (Valerie Pachner, also seen opposite Diehl’s Walter Gropius in the new German series Bauhaus). Here, however, she’s just a strong, long-suffering farm wife with three small daughters, who can do nothing to impede her husband’s headlong rush into oblivion at the hands of town leaders, officers, and priests who all counsel him to just go with the fascist flow.

It’s easy to see why Malick was attracted to this material, since Christlike mortification always anchors his philosophical quasi-storytelling. But this suffering is mostly in silence, as Franz refuses to explain himself to his interrogators, including Matthias Schoenaert’s Gestapo man and a judge played by Bruno Ganz, in his penultimate screen appearance. (The German-speaking cast largely works in English, inexplicably reverting to their home language on rare occasions.)

The director’s choice is odd, because much of what we know about the real Jägerstätter, beatified by Pope Benedict in 2007, comes from a large volume of letters collected from what passed between the married couple. For Malick, stoicism is its own reward, and he seems uninterested in what his subjects actually thought and said. This means that, apart from some clever use of old newsreel footage, the film’s three hours must be spent with distantly murmuring folks either tilling the earth or staring at the sky, towards a heaven that promises God’s voice but only delivers enemy planes.