“To the Wonder” is very much a story, even a simple story, and Malick’s first to be set in the contemporary world. Unlike “The Tree of Life,” it doesn’t feature scenes in Heaven, in prehistory, or the distant cosmos—yet it is no less a metaphysical extravaganza, which is all the more remarkable inasmuch it is a movie of life at hand. Malick’s art—and it is an art as original and distinctive as it is profound and heartfelt—is that of looking at situations and settings that are so classical as to risk banality and to restore to them a full, even overflowing, aspect of (yes) wonder, by means of the conception of the action and the way that he films them. Malick, judging from the evidence, knows a lot about love and its pain. As he brings his love story to the screen, he also brings out serious ideas about the trials of the artistic life, about the conflict between the Catholic heritage and the Protestant one, about the tense mutual influence of Europe and America—and, most amazingly, he does it with images and sounds, not with speeches and drama. Malick here turns the very act of cinematic vision, of filming, philosophical.

“To the Wonder” looks like no other film—almost every shot features a wandering, floating, probing, tilting camera. Its attention to light is unique, and Malick’s way with his story is equally distinctive. Most of the moments in the film are interstitial; the story is conjured and suggested rather than shown, and the emotions are evoked and induced rather than performed. Malick’s very idea of character and action is as radical as his vision and, for that matter, as his philosophy, and that comes through in even the barest attempt to summarize the plot.

The story takes place over the span of a year or two, and it’s centered on a man’s romantic fortune. The man is played by Ben Affleck; he is, first, in France with a French-Russian woman played by Olga Kurylenko; she returns with him (and with her ten-year-old daughter, Tatiana, played by Tatiana Chiline) to the United States (to a small town and its creeping suburb in the central-south). There, while he works as an engineer involved in an environmental investigation of the surrounding oil-related industries, the relationship sours, in part because of the man’s encounter with an acquaintance from earlier years—another woman (played by Rachel McAdams), a rancher or horse-breeder. Meanwhile, the town’s Catholic priest (Javier Bardem), whose faith is shaken, becomes involved at the edge of the romantic intrigue as a tenuous yet sympathetic advisor. There’s no way to avoid spoilers altogether, but let’s say that the French-Russian woman—who is ultimately revealed to have been a failed or frustrated ballet dancer—comes back into the picture, as do the couple’s unresolved conflicts.

Note that I haven’t mentioned the names of the three adults in this tenuous triangle (or, for that matter, of the priest); that’s because I don’t think they’re mentioned in the movie (even though IMDb cites names for them). In any case, if their names are in fact heard (and I’ve seen the movie twice), it’s in a flicker of passing that could easily go unnoticed, and I confess to surprise, in reading reviews, that other critics have mentioned them. Malick constructs the story as thelove story, as the story of stories, as a primordial archetype realized in practical and even familiar places, and he films his unnamed characters more or less without dialogue—but with plenty of language. From the very beginning of the film to just before the end, the soundtrack is adorned with voice-over by the four adult characters (Kurylenko’s, in French; Bardem’s, in Spanish) in which they reflect on the enduring traces of the fleeting emotions of the recent past and apostrophize, as if in letters unsent, on the tensions that emerge.

I’ve long believed it to be a kind of narrative laziness or mere conventionalism on the part of filmmakers to suppress what they may know of their characters’ lives and thoughts—who are their parents, who are their friends, where did they grow up, what are their passions and pleasures, how much money do they have in the bank, what do they like to read? Malick avoids these questions—but digs deep into his characters’ thoughts and sensibilities in other ways. He watches them carefully, sees their interactions—their wanderings, whether in the Jardin du Luxembourg or along the coast of northern France or an American prairie or the constrained streets of a uniform housing development, or their circlings in a house or a laundromat or the aisles of a church—as a sort of dance, albeit not as a performance. And the camera dances along with them, in situations of such carefully observed light as to make the results non-material—what makes them not dance-like is their weightlessness. Malick captures pure textures and tones, as if using the camera to make paintings in motion.

There is perhaps no film in the history of cinema that reveals such attention to light, which seems to suffuse the space of every frame and to imbue the characters with its moral and spiritual element. Malick treats light as something of the main substance of the film, even the main subject of the film, as well as its crucial (and deeply conceived) metaphor. Anyone who has been to the northern coast of France should have exulted in the quality of the light, and Malick—who establishes the movie’s thematic harmony early on with a crucial scene in which the man and the French woman visit Mont Saint-Michel—makes the contrast between French and American light, between the coast and the heartland, between the cathedral and the town, the fundamental tonality of the movie, a sort of cinematic music from which the action unfurls and to which Malick recurs, brilliantly and joltingly, with a sure and assertively audacious editing sense. The spire of the cathedral plays the role of a radio antenna of a singular, world-encompassing power, and the frequency it tunes to is one of light. The cut from that coastal setting to the man’s middle-American town is one of the smartest, deepest, and most dramatic in the recent cinema, and he matches it with two more like it, near the end of the film (including the very last cut of the film, from the penultimate shot to the final one, which is simply too good to spoil).

The spire of the cathedral plays the role of a radio antenna of a singular, world-encompassing power, and the frequency it tunes to is one of light. Malick avoids many of the ordinary particulars of a couple’s life—why are they together, what drives them apart. He sees mortality in a relationship as surely as he sees it in life itself and attempts to find, in the ongoing mourning for a relationship, an element of redemption. Meanwhile, though his lovers’ transactions are sublimated, their relations with their surroundings emerge all the more eloquently in fragments of encounters with people who, to all appearances, aren’t professional actors but, rather, residents of the town whom Malick recruited. The grain of life emerges in fine detail even as many of the mechanical connections are elided.

There are some important cinematic forebears whose influence is apparent. The primal love-story archetype in which the lovers’ names aren’t known—and where the movements of the camera and the scenographic invention conveys even more than the performance—is F. W. Murnau’s 1927 silent film “Sunrise.” As for the attention to light, the only rivals and precursors to Malick’s film are those of Jean-Luc Godard, from the nineteen-eighties and early nineties; in several images, Malick makes explicit reference to one of them, “Nouvelle Vague,” and some key moments in the movie are reminiscent of “Hail Mary.”

Viewers with expectations, or, rather, prejudices regarding what constitutes a movie—regarding scripts, acting, and psychology—are bound to be confounded by “To the Wonder.” Malick has little interest in the psychology of his characters—in fact, it’s hard to call them characters. And the actors who bring them to life have a very difficult job, which they do remarkably. The people, like the places, are more or less weightless, and, while Kurylenko, with her long lines and light-footed agility, maintains the illusion effortlessly, Affleck, a solid and muscular performer, manages to render himself diaphanous; he conveys a sense of thoughtful and willful individuality without weighing himself down with the emphatic acting-out of character traits.

Malick suggests, evokes, hints—and some extraordinarily significant elements of the plot (or of whatever the plot might be) zip by in flicking, fleeting images that would likely leave a viewer to wonder what had happened. It’s as if the entire movie were filmed in the conditional mood; like a fable of actual life, it’s not a movie about what happened, but about what could have happened—yet the uncertainty isn’t that of the characters, whose own power of perception or memory isn’t in question. The sense of possibility implicit in the elusive story is also a second possibility—a spiritual possibility, of sanctification in pain. Things don’t necessarily end happily in “To the Wonder,” but they possibly end well. For the anguish and the ruin that he saw in “Days of Heaven,” there may be a redemption—and, all the more remarkably, it may not even emerge from anything like faith, but, simply, from seeing the light.