Jake Cole’s review published on Letterboxd:
How funny that this film should have been widely greeted as Malick lapsing into self-parody when in fact it blows open his filmography, its intimate scale proving that the vastness in Malick's work was never tied to his grandiose shots of Nature and Grace. The Tree of Life pushed the tactile aspect of Malick's cinema into new realms of transcendence, but of course that transcendence was the point, as the director extrapolated out, Joyce-like, from the immediacy of the individual to the cosmic order that contains him.
To the Wonder, by contrast, is a true compartmentalization, a keening search for meaning that is for the first time in Malick's cinema truly contained within its characters. Oh sure, Affleck, Kurylenko, McAdams and Bardem are still playing elemental characters, but their frustrations with love (romantic and divine) are not rendered symbolically but viscerally. Probing questions of modern unease abound; this is, even factoring in Malick staying in this vein for his next two features, his most Antonioni-esque film. But they are rendered through the subtle elegance of body language and framing.
Watch how much of Marina's discomfort with the Midwest and her sense of isolation is communicated through the careful arching of Kurylenko's posture, or of her standing in shadow or being cut off by the edge of the frame. So little is said in this film, maybe the least in any of Malick's features, yet I don't think the emotional pitch of the characters has ever been clearer than in Kurylenko dancing against the constraints of her life, Affleck shuffling dully through a Normal Life he finds empty, or Bardem hunched in shame at Quintana's loss of faith.
Both The New World and The Tree of Life contained plenty of contrasts that suggested a Koyaanisqatsi-like aversion for the European and modern, but To the Wonder begins a corrective trend in Malick's work that acknowledges the coldness in so much modern life, particularly in the cookie-cutter houses in every middle-class Midwest neighborhood of the film that exist in little archipelago subdivisions that are surrounded by purchased and flattened but as-yet undeveloped land that just sits vacant in silent testament to the housing crisis. But Malick takes such care to find the beauty in everything. The laundromat in this movie is so gorgeously lit I feel like I've neglected the inherent beauty of my washer and dryer.
The editing, per usual, finds the links in Malick's totalizing coverage, and the out-of-time assemblage finds resonance in how passion and detachment can slur in and out of each other, the temporal jumble a reflection of memories both positive and negative. This is in many ways Malick's bleakest film, but even here it makes peace with feelings of loss and solitude, seeing separation not as failure but another hurdle of life. And this may be the only time in cinema that a priest depicted as having lost his faith regains it not through annihilation or other extremity but simply by bearing witness to the poor and neglected that Christ called His kin; the scenes of Quintana sitting with prisoners, addicts and other social derelicts renew his faith. The misery of corporeal existence does not suggest God's absence. Rather, the ability to persevere and endure is proof of His presence. This is a film of inarticulation, longing, discontent, but the ability to keep going suggests a level of grace on an immediate level that Malick's other films deliver more abstractly.