First Look At Ben Affleck & Olga Kurylenko In Terrence Malick’s TO THE WONDER

Here’s the new photo of Ben Affleck & Olga Kurylenko in Terrence Malick’s TO THE WONDER, premiering tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival as a Special Presentation. Malick was nominated for Golden Lion award at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. That festival began on August 29 and finished on Saturday.

In TO THE WONDER, after visiting Mont Saint-Michel – once known in France as the Wonder – at the height of their love, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and Neil (Ben Affleck) come to Oklahoma, where problems soon arise. Marina makes the acquaintance of a priest and fellow exile (Javier Bardem), who is struggling with his vocation, while Neil renews his ties with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams). Such high drama!

Written and directed by Terrence Malick, TO THE WONDER is an exploration of love in its many forms. For those of you who are fans of this director – Terrence Malick is an award-winning director-writer-producer whose prolific career has spanned over four decades. His feature film Days of Heaven (78) earned him the Best Director award at Cannes and The Tree of Life (11) won last year’s Palme d’Or. His other features are Badlands (73), The Thin Red Line (98), The New World (05) and To the Wonder (12).

Malick studied philosophy at Harvard, and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; before he became a filmmaker, he translated Martin Heidegger. For all its visual poetry, his work shows a passionate interest in ideas. Where THE NEW WORLD and TREE OF LIFE open themselves to analysis of spirituality and ethics, TO THE WONDER continues that intellectual investigation into the realm of politics and faith. It is also, like TREE OF LIFE, gloriously engaged with cinematic form itself. Read Travis Keune’s TREE OF LIFE review HERE.

As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious responses from his viewers. It is gratifying to note that the same man who long ago wrote an uncredited draft of Dirty Harry now finds freedom in the transcendental.