Curator Watchlist
A haunting, strangely lyrical crime film that turns a teenage killing spree into an American fable about loneliness, delusion, and the seduction of outlaw myth. Its calm narration, sunlit landscapes, and eerie emotional distance make the violence feel even more unsettling.
Where to watch: Buy
Sat · 1h 34m
Director: Terrence Malick
Starring: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates
An impressionable teenage girl from a dead-end town and her older greaser boyfriend embark on a killing spree in the South Dakota badlands.
Terrence Malick
Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates
A haunting, strangely lyrical crime film that turns a teenage killing spree into an American fable about loneliness, delusion, and the seduction of outlaw myth. Its calm narration, sunlit landscapes, and eerie emotional distance make the violence feel even more unsettling.
Badlands is one of the great American crime films because it refuses to behave like one. Terrence Malick frames a spree of murder and flight with such serenity that the landscape seems to absorb the characters’ emptiness, turning their romance into something both seductive and deeply tragic.
The film’s power comes from contrast: Sissy Spacek’s soft, almost childlike narration against the coldness of the acts, and the wide-open beauty of the plains against the claustrophobia of bad choices. It is dreamy, funny in flashes, and quietly horrifying.
What lingers is not the body count but the mood: a sense of innocence curdling in real time. It’s an essential watch for anyone interested in how style can complicate sympathy and make violence feel mythic without ever making it feel harmless.
issy 🥝 · 4782 likes
honestly the lands seemed quite nice I think it was the murder that was bad
mia lee vicino (4.5★) · 3098 likes
“The film's tag line ("In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people") inspired the Zodiac Killer, who had been lying low for years, to write a letter to a newspaper denouncing their flippant attitude to violence in society by running such an ad.” this man and his many hats made the zodiac killer come out of retirement and we should all be terrified
Patrick Willems (4.5★) · 2375 likes
It's gorgeous and serene and wistful plus Martin Sheen murders a ton of people
˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ (3★) · 2253 likes
anyone that isn’t holly: kit: 🔫💥🤠💥‼️🔫🔫🤠💥‼️🔫💥
Nakul (4.5★) · 2032 likes
Sheen’s James Dean imitation is really great but the thing i love about Badlands the most is Spacek’s voiceover. Her voice lends the movie a dreamlike feel, there’s such a contrast between her tone and the violence we’re witnessing on screen.
Another Malick film where rapturous natural imagery collides with betrayal, desire, and moral drift.
For viewers who respond to Malick’s meditative voice, lyrical landscapes, and philosophical distance.
A lyrical American road film about isolation, damaged intimacy, and the vastness of the landscape.
Shares Malick’s tenderness toward the American landscape and quiet, reflective pacing.
A fugitive-couple crime story that balances humor, melancholy, and media-fueled mythmaking.
A violent outlaw romance that examines how style can glamorize and distort brutality.
For the doomed-couple energy, romantic fatalism, and pop-mythic crime tone.
A poetic Depression-era outlaw story with tenderness, drift, and doomed love.
A cool, morally slippery crime film about manipulation, family damage, and emotional vacancy.
A melancholic American drift movie with a fractured sense of hope and identity.
A foundational outlaw-couple film whose romance and violence feel dangerously intertwined.
A tragic fugitive romance that anticipates the tender, doomed energy of later crime films.
outlaw romance, teen alienation, violence and innocence, American mythmaking, road movie, moral detachment, loneliness, fatalism
crime drama, outlaw couple, road movie, 1970s cinema, dreamlike tone, American Midwest, fatalistic, lyrical visuals, coming-of-age, neo-noir adjacent