CANNES, France — In “The Tree of Life,” a cosmic head movie of the most ambitious order, Terrence Malick reaches high, his ecstatic camera and thoughts soaring. Shown on Monday morning at a press screening at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with pre-emptive, harshly insistent boos and a vigorous rejoinder of equally determined applause, the film directly addresses the larger questions of existence that are woven throughout Mr. Malick’s work. It seeks to affirm the beauty of a world in which God is present in all things.

“The Tree of Life” is Mr. Malick’s first film since “The New World” (2005), a title that could work for this new movie as well. Running 2 hours 18 minutes, it is a personal, impressionistic work — beautiful, nonlinear, trippy, flawed — that unfolds largely in fragmented flashbacks, tracing not only the arc of a single life but also that of creation itself. As the title suggests, Mr. Malick has nothing less in mind than the origin of life, a beginning (or Beginning) in which vaporous swirls, gurgling lava and fiery explosions give way to the sight of a meteor hitting a planet (presumably Earth), an explosive vision that Mr. Malick audaciously, riskily, joins with the image of a pregnant woman’s belly.

The issue isn’t merely that Mr. Malick visually connects the impregnated planet, as it were, and the expectant woman, an association that sets a Mother Earth motif in motion. It’s also in the seriousness and sincerity with which he makes this connection: The film is an affirmation of Mr. Malick’s belief in the power of cinematic images to express the sublime (the cinematographer is Emmanuel Lubezki) and, perhaps, of his faith in the audience to meet him with equivalent seriousness.

It also serves as a reminder of how few contemporary filmmakers engage questions of life and death, God and soul, and risk such questioning without the crutch of an obvious story. It isn’t that these life questions aren’t asked in our movies; they are, if sometimes obliquely. Rather it’s the directness of Mr. Malick’s engagement with them that feels so surprising at this moment, and that goes against the mainstream filmmaking grain.