And Franz (August Diehl) is not the only one who suffers. He is imprisoned, first in a rural jail and then in Berlin’s Tegel prison. Some of the words we hear on the soundtrack are drawn from the letters that pass between him and his wife, Franziska (Valerie Pachner). She stays behind to tend the farm with her sister and mother-in-law, and also to endure the hostility of the neighbors. The film is divided between Franz’s and Franziska’s points of view, and returns to images of them together with their three daughters against a backdrop of fields and mountains — pictures of everyday life and also of an earthly paradise that can withstand human evil.

The arresting visual beauty of “A Hidden Life,” which was shot by Joerg Widmer, is essential to its own argument, and to Franz’s ethical and spiritual rebuttal to the concerns of his persecutors and would-be allies. The topography of the valley is spectacular, but so are the churches and cathedrals. Even the cells and offices are infused with an aesthetic intensity at once sensual and picturesque. The hallmarks of Malick’s later style are here: the upward tilt of the camera to capture new vistas of sky and landscape; the brisk gliding along rivers and roads; the elegant cutting between the human and natural worlds; the reverence for music and the mistrust of speech. (The score is by James Newton Howard.)

But this is the most linear and, in spite of its nearly three-hour length, the most concentrated film he has made in a long time. More than “To the Wonder” or “Knight of Cups” or even the sublime “Tree of Life,” it tells a story with a beginning, a middle and end, and a moral. Malick’s lyricism sometimes washes out the psychological and historical details of the narrative. The political context is minimal, supplied by documentary footage of Nazi rallies at the beginning and Hitler at home in the middle. The performers don’t so much act as manifest conditions of being, like figures in a religious painting.