Terrence Malick/ USA/ 2015/ 118 mins

In which Christian Bale stares at a beach for two hours, whispering gnomic platitudes about love and suffering in a breathy voiceover like a parody of a perfume ad.  A perfume named Pretension by Terrence Malick.

Flippant knee-jerk sneering aside; from Badlands onward Malick has given the impression that he sees narrative as something of a necessary evil, and with Knight of Cups he has finally exorcised that particular demon, and instead portrays a somnambulant Bale gliding through a spiritual crisis of hedonistic excess, first-world problems, and unfeasibly beautiful women.  Happens to us all.

Rick is a hotshot Hollywood screenwriter, the eponymous ‘Knight’. In tarot, drawing this card first indicates a young man who should be in his prime yet is suffering from inertia or crisis, possibly in their career, or in the metaphysical sense.  Malick presents Rick’s quest through the combined spectra of Eastern mysticism (the chapters are split into various chapters referring to a different card), and the evergreen allegory of Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress.

Unfortunately, one man’s existential journey is often everyone else’s interminable navel-gazing – although Rick does a lot of gazing at the navels of many other people – and, with the abstract nature of Malick’s storytelling, it would be hard to engage with a likeable person. To engage with Rick, broiling in a personal hell of his own solipsism, is nigh on impossible. Knight of Cups reaches for the lyrical and the profound; the transcendent even, but when Malick often silences his characters in mid-flow as they proselytise their theories on love and life, it rather negates the ostensible point that Rick is on a search for life’s lessons.

If the film works at all, it’s as a further showcase for genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Utilising everything from the panoramic (those beaches!), to Go-pro cameras, it’s at times achingly gorgeous; yet feels like a deftly-edited slideshow of empty virtuosity thanks to the hollow ephemera of the film itself.

What Lubezki does manage is to pinpoint the specific appeal and beauty of each of the women Rick is involved with. Malick is one of those auteurs whose very name has a Pavlovian call to actors, and the likes of Imogen Poots, Isabel Lucas, Cate Blanchett, Freida Pinto, and Natalie Portman have answered his siren call here.  Unfortunately, they are wasted in cameos where they say much but all talk with the same voice; that of Malick.

Knight of Cups attempts to show us the glittery veneer of the American Dream is easily chipped away to show the soulless void beneath; but it is too obtuse, aimless and self-regarding to instil anything in the viewer other than a rampant craving for a drink or six. Tedium has rarely looked so pretty.