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Song to Song destroyed me emotionally. Terrence Malick's films usually do, but in this case the Austin-set romance between Rooney Mara and Ryan Gosling's lost souls struck a personal nerve. Raw and surprisingly hopeful in ways I couldn't have expected, it's a film of life experiences culminating in real time to capture the emotional cost of vulnerability.

A septuagenarian filmmaker has intertwined a million beautiful things: live music, diaphanous curtains, Rooney Mara's midriff and shoulders, the sun setting on Austin's skyline, plus earth, water, fire, and air. The camera undulates appreciatively between them... The touch of pale limb to picturesque torso (with only a glimpse or two of titty) seems to pose a hazard to the soul. It's ridiculous, if sometimes heartbreaking, and never less than pretty.

Malick's waking dream imagery results in an atmosphere that comes into sharper focus than usual. That said, the increasingly tiresome Malickian tropes are all present and correct: disembodied voices ask big, meaningful questions; stunning women skip and spin in girlish abandon, then sob uncontrollably against a backdrop of infinity pools and palm trees. It all adds up to a beautiful nothing.

The film exemplifies [Malick's] unique and ultra-sensual mode of montage-based storytelling, where human characters are constantly submerged in an endless, glowing stream of consciousness. Here, the eyes are not the only the window to the soul – the twitch of the hand, a twist of the neck, the accelerated breathing pattern can also offer vital signs of life. The eyes are less important that what those eyes are looking at, and who's looking back.

Tantalising, infuriating, utterly distinctive but also sometimes wearyingly repetitious, at once richly composed and yet often curiously lackadaisical. It feels more loosely assembled than any of Malick's other recent films, but also flaunts this quality.

Two hours and change in the company of these characters reveals virtually nothing about any of them, even though the leads—as is the case in every Malick film—continually relay their innermost thoughts in whispery voiceover. Replace the entire cast with catalog models and the movie would play much the same, and look far more honest.

It's not explicitly concerned with spirituality, as other Malick films are, yet the spiritual force that animates virtually all his work is impossible to overlook. Whether the film succeeds as a whole is less important than the seriousness of its intent—it's worth experiencing and grappling with... Malick has come closest to trailblazers like Bresson in his development of a filmic language all his own.

Malick's control has allowed him to whittle his films down to bare essentials. He's learned exactly which moments he needs. The central triangle of Song to Song holds echoes of the passions at the core of Days of Heaven, but Malick's means of communicating them have evolved. "Stuffed" is not an inapt word for describing Song to Song, for as much as it is a film overflowing with sights and sounds, it also seems crammed into the nooks of Austin as Malick was observing it.

I thought Song To Song was ass-numbing drivel. It's an Adam and Eve story that, aside from some scenes filmed at Austin music festivals, has the mise en scène of porn. This is a statement of fact: Much of the movie is set in hotel suites and realtor-ready mid-sized mansions that look like the crew rented them about two hours before filming, with the actors tossing around bed linens and touching each other's faces in an endless clothed dance that approximates sex.

It features every stylistic trick in the Malick playbook: skies dotted with lustrous clouds, characters murmuring their deepest thoughts in voice-over ("I forget what I am. Whose I am."), birds and butterflies flitting around like silent, restless witnesses. Song to Song is slightly less pretentious than Malick's last film, the 2015 sigh of ennui Knight of Cups, though it features just as many miniature actresses.

There's evenness to the deployment, whilst ideas progress—far more intricately and mysteriously than it might seem. Malick's associative progressions elude easy interpretation, playing more like a jazz soloist's embellishments than an ascending scale. And motifs do arise, most evidently trees, windows, caressed bellies, and in Will Patterson's virtuosic sound design, invasions of crickets and birds and wind overtaking dialogue.

The fact that 73-year-old Malick continues to provoke even with a comparatively "minor" set of films (after the grand historical and cosmological ambitions of The New World [2005] and The Tree of Life) speaks to just how ahead of his time he remains. The greatest artistic provocation of all is that of surprising, strange, and innovative art that dares the ridiculous in the pursuit of beauty. One day we'll look back on this period of Malick's career and rue that we didn't realize that.